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lUNIVERSI^ OF CALIFORNIA
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BT
EASTER!^
WINDOWS
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BY THE ATJTHOE OF
SIX BELLS OFF JAVA
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BY
EASTERN
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THE STORY OF A BATTLE
OF SOULS AND MINDS IN
THE PRISON CAMPS
OF SUMATRA
BY
WILLIAM H. McDOUGALL, jR.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1949
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Copyright, 1949 , by
WILLIAM H. McDOUGALL, Je.
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons
A
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To My Sister
JEAN
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I
The Other Side of the Door
1
II
Roll Call
i 6
III
Ode to Phoebus
25
IV
Dysentery and Palembang Bottom— No
Relation
37
V
Charitas
49
VI
We Keep Holy the Sabbath Day
58
VII
Just Another Day
76
VIII
New Year Inventory
95
IX
Barracks Camp— Harbinger of Evil Days
109
X
Verities: Mundane and Eternal
120
XI
The Reckoning
131
XII
The Saga of Eric Germann
140
XIII
Out of the Bangka Straits
156
XIV
McDougall’s Bedroom & Morgue
167
XV
Malaria
175
XVI
How Men Starve
18;
XVII
The Beri-Beri Song
203
XVIII
Building for the Payoff
214
XIX
How Men Die
225
XX
Christmas Comes Again
252
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viii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
XXI
Belalau
26c
XXII
Let's Go Smuggling
276
XXIII
Ubi Raiding
303
XXIV
By Eastern Windows
311
XXV
New Brews in Old Bottles
322
XXVI
Return
336
Index
345
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Locale of Author’s Prison Years in Indonesia
Palembang Jail — April 5, 1942-January 1943
Barracks Camp (in city of Palembang) January 1943-September 1943
Muntok Prison — September 1943-March 1945
Belalau — March 1945-September 19, 1945
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The Other Side of the Door
O LD Blinker rolled his head on the slab-like
concrete platform where he lay dying in Mun-
tok Prison hospital Christmas Eve, 1944, and
asked, '‘When does the music begin?”
“Pretty soon now,” I said, stepping from the floor up onto
the platform beside him. “The choir is being counted
through the gate.”
“Good,” said old Brinker, cracking his last joke, “then Pll
be able to compare them with the angels.”
His face was a grey blur in the feeble light which barely
reached this corner of the room from the distant kerosene
lamp.
“Afraid the angels won't sing as well,” I said, “because
they won’t have Father Bakker to lead them.”
Despite his exhaustion and the pain it cost him, Brinker
chuckled. Father Bakker, a soft-voiced little Hollander with
a Vandyke beard, was the choir director.
When Japan had invaded the Netherlands East Indies in
February, 1942, Father Bakker had been pastor of the
Catholic church in the harbor town of Muntok on Bangka
Island, some 250 miles south of Singapore— just below the
equator and off the east coast of Sumatra. Muntok Prison
was an old pile of stone and iron built by the Dutch in a pre-
vious century to house life-term native prisoners and, after
many years, abandoned and converted to a warehouse for
Bangka’s foremost crop, white pepper. The Japanese had
1
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reconverted the prison to its original use and interned there
hundreds of Allied nationals including Father Bakker;
Brinker, a rubber plantation inspector, and me, an American
war correspondent who now worked in the prison hospital.
Death rapidly was thinning our population.
The dying Brinker, whose mother tongue was Dutch and
for whom English was difficult, gathered his strength to
speak again.
‘Ask Father Bakker to come and see me . . . after-
wards.”
I evaded a direct answer. Father Bakker wouldn’t be lead-
ing the choir tonight. He was ill himself, lying in his cell
shivering with malaria.
“I’ll ask him to dedicate a song to you,” I said, feeling
Brinker’s pulse. “Got any special request?”
“Silent Night.”
“Okay,” I said, stepping down off the bench, “I’ll tell
him.”
The dysentery ward where Brinker lay, like the other six
wards in Muntok Prison hospital, was a long, narrow room.
Two cement platforms, or benches as we called them, eight
feet wide and sloping from head to foot, ran its entire length
on either side of a central aisle. Men lay shoulder to shoul-
der, fifteen and sixteen to a bench, their feet toward the
aisle. Patients tended to slip downward because of the slope.
Attendants were busy readjusting sick men on the benches
and answering pleas for bedpans.
I walked outside to catch a breath of fresh air and to watch
the choir. Eleven emaciated singers, tottering remnants of
a once splendid twenty-six voice a capella chorus, had just
filed through the gate which barred the hospital from the
main prison. A Japanese guard had counted them through.
Now he waited, bayoneted rifle at rest, in the shadows of
the tropic night.
The singers stood in a semi-circle of light halfway along
the covered cement walk onto which all the wards opened.
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At the rear of the middle ward a Dutchman and an English-
man stood on a platform erected on one of the benches so
that their heads would be higher than the tops of the parti-
tions separating the wards and their voices thus could carry
through the entire hospital. A wire mesh extended from the
top of each partition to the ceiling. They were to read, in
their respective languages and a verse at a time, the gospel
story of the birth of Christ. Three years before. Father
Bakker had set St. Luke’s words to music of his own com-
position and his choir had sung it each Christmas Eve since.
The same two announcers also had done the reading: Beissel
von Gymnich, who once had been our chief cook; and huge-
barrelled, black-bearded W. Probyn Allen, of the ringing
voice and Gargantuan laughter, who once had helped me
edit the prison “newspaper.”
The substitute choir director sounded key of C on his
pitch-pipe and pointed his baton. Singers hummed their
respective notes. The humming grew in volume, reflecting
off walls which acted as sounding boards and lent their sing-
ing the deep, sustained quality of organ tones. The buzzing
of voices in the hospital ceased. Beissel’s voice, then Allen’s,
rang through the wards.
And it came to pass that in those days there went
out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that the whole
world should be enrolled. This enrolling was first made
by Cyrinus, the governor of Syria. And all went to be
enrolled, every one into his own city.
Allen stopped speaking, the director’s baton pointed up-
ward, swept down and the sacred cantata began.
The delirious mutterings of a malaria patient sounded
from a bench nearby. This was the fever ward. From the
next ward came bubbly groans of beri-beri victims whose
lungs were filling with serum as they literally drowned in
their own juice. Beri-beri is a malnutritional disease that
takes one of two courses, depending on what complications
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accompany it. The victim either swells with liquid or
shrivels to skin and bones. From the dysentery ward came
sounds of bedpans banging on concrete, reminding us that
dysentery patients, although they were trying to be quiet,
could not wait.
The story continued, Beissel speaking first, then Allen.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the
city of Nazareth into Judea, to the city of David, which
is called Bethlehem: because he was of the house and
family of David, to be enrolled with Mary his espoused
wife, who was with child.
Allen stopped speaking and the choir took up the words.
I knew Father Bakker could hear them where he lay in
a cell across the yard in the opposite wing of the building
which held the hospital. After he was interned Father
Bakker had organized the choir from among his fellow pris-
oners, transforming their heterogeneous and mediocre
voices into one superb instrument of song. Many pieces, like
the Christmas cantata, were his own compositions. Every-
thing the choir sang was his own arrangement. It had to be
because when he was thrust into jail he went with only the
clothing he wore. His beloved music was left behind. He
wrote his music on whatever scraps of paper he could find
and composed without instruments in the babel of a place
so crowded that men lived and died, elbow to elbow, cheek
to jowl. Father Bakker's mind was instrument enough.
And it came to pass, that when they were there, her
days were accomplished, that she should be delivered.
And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped
him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger;
because there was no room for them in the inn.
Directly at Allen's feet lay a dying man who had been a
police official in Sumatra before the war. I first met Officer
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Francken in a hill station of western Sumatra, April 2, 1942,
the night after I was captured for the second time.
With other shipwreck survivors cast up from the Indian
Ocean I had been added to a cortege of Dutch civilian resi-
dents of southwestern Sumatra who were being rounded up
for internment on the other side of the island. Glumly we
were trying to find space on the floor to sleep when Francken
was added to our numbers. He was loaded down with luggage
which had not yet been searched. As soon as the guard left
the room Francken opened his luggage, laughed and pulled
out a bottle, and another bottle, and another.
“Drink up,” he shouted. “Drink up! Tonight we must
laugh because it may be a long time until we can laugh
again.”
Later he asked me,
“Mr. American,”— I was the only American in a crowd of
Hollanders— “you are a correspondent?”
“That’s right. United Press.”
“Someday you will write a story about this?”
“Perhaps.”
“If you do, write that Francken gave you your last drink
of cognac on your last night outside of jail.”
He handed me a bottle containing just enough for a
final drink. I held it aloft in salute, then drained it and re-
turned the empty bottle, saying,
“Okay, pal, you will be immortalized in print.” *
And there were in the same country shepherds
watching, and keeping the night-watches over their
flock. And behold an angel of the Lord stood by them,
and the brightness of God shone round about them,
and they feared with a great fear.
* Francken is not his real name, nor is Brinker the real name of the
other dying man. Because of their families I have used fictitious names
for certain men whose stories appear here. Wherever a pseudonym is used
it will be indicated. My fellow prisoners who read this book will easily
recognize the men described.
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I thought of the fears that plagued these men around me
as they lay, many knowing that this was their last Christ-
mas. What do men think of when they are about to die?
I knew what I thought when I myself was about to die be-
cause I had waited one whole afternoon— conscious and
with a clear mind— for certain death, only to be saved by
my own private miracle. And I had nursed and watched
die of starvation and disease more than two hundred men
in this chamber of horrors for prisoners of war.
I came to believe that, although every individual has
thoughts peculiar to his own conscience, there are certain
basic thoughts shared by most men when they, irrevocably,
face their Great Common Denominator, Death: What
and Who await them on the Other Side of the Door?
Take old Brinker, who wasn’t really old in years, only 55,
but was physically old with the premature age of a lifetime
in the tropics.
As a youth fresh out of school he had come from Holland
to the Indies in search of fortune. Now he was lying there
totaling up the score, balancing the is with the might have
been. During his early years there had been lonely periods
of exile in jungle outposts; and later, easier, more convivial
years in the restricted white colonial society of little Sumatra
towns that were trading centers and clearing houses for
rubber or tea or coffee or tobacco. Hard work there had
been on plantations, yes, but work wherein he moved on a
higher plane than the brown-skinned natives around him.
And, at the club in town, there was companionship and har-
monizing over schnapps and beer. He had been so busy
with the day-by-day things of life that he had lost track of
time until suddenly thirty-five years had gone down the
calendar and it was time for retirement. But a prison camp
had interrupted his pension plans and accelerated his physi-
cal decline.
First had come fever. Malaria was not new to an old
jungle hand like Brinker but malaria without quinine was.
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Meanwhile, hunger sapped his vitals. His protein-and-
vitamin-starved body broke out with blisters, then sores
which deepened into ulcers on his hands, arms, feet and
legs. So he progressed from the fever ward to the septic ward,
and was grateful that he had been able to skip the beri-beri
ward. However, when a few weeks ago he had been carried
into the dysentery ward, he knew instinctively it was the end
and he began to think about God.
Drinker was a Catholic but it had been so easy to forget
God during the pleasantly busy years away from Holland
in the outposts of Sumatra. Sunday was the one morning of
the week he could rise late, dawdle over breakfast and
coffee and read the accumulated newspapers from Batavia.
And when he did go to Mass the priest’s sermon too often
included something which uncomfortably reminded Drinker
of sin. He didn’t want to be reminded of sin. Damn such re-
minders. So he stayed away. Life was too short not to have
a little fun.
How short they had been . . . the years . . . and the
fun shorter still. Here in prison he couldn’t sleep sometimes,
for thinking about the fun and the wasted Sunday mornings
piled up on the red ink side of his bank account with God.
He sent for Father Bakker and told him,
“I’ve been away thirty years.”
Then to Father Bakker he whispered his confession.
Every morning after that a priest brought communion
to Drinker in the dysentery ward. And, when I made my
rounds of the wards, changing bandages and swabbing sores,
and stopped at Drinker’s place, he had a smile for me in-
stead of a sour look. That was quite a transformation for a
man who had been one of my grouchiest patients. He could
smile because his heart was calm. He was at peace inside.
He figured that Father Bakker had turned for him the key
to the kingdom of heaven.
The music stopped again and Allen’s voice carried to the
dysentery ward.
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And the angel said to them: Fear not; for, behold, I
bring you good tidings of great joy, that shall be to all
the people; for, this day is born to you a Saviour, who is
Christ the Lord, in the city of David.
The hospital was singularly quiet now. Patients able to
sit up might have been statues sculptured with bent heads
as their minds projected them away from the prison, across
the seas to home. Next after death, fears concerning their
families dogged men most. For nearly three years their
names had been on the lists of missing. Had they long ago
been given up for dead? More than anything else, except
food, men wanted their families to know they were alive.
I felt sure, as the music filled my heart, that somehow my
family must know I was alive. That prisoner of war post-
card the Japanese had allowed each man to send two years
ago must have gotten home.
Please, God, let them know Pm alive.
Again the music ceased and Allen's voice narrated the
angel’s words to the shepherds near Bethlehem:
And this shall be a sign unto you: You shall find the
infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a
manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a
multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and say-
ing: Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to
men of good will.
Choral voices swelled. Climactic Hosannas rolled through
the wards and resounded off concrete walls, then died. I
told the director of old Brinker’s request for Silent Night.
The choir sang it, alternating the verses in English and
Dutch.
Silent Night, Holy Night,
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child,
Holy Infant so tender and mild.
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.
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That ended the concert. Singers were marched back to
the main prison. Gates were slammed and locked. I started
for my own bunk in the hospital staff quarters.
An attendant stopped me, saying,
“Brinker wants a priest."
At first I thought Brinker merely was requesting Father
Bakker to visit him but the attendant said no, any priest.
‘'He says he’s nearly finished."
Walking across the court to one of the cells in the wing
opposite the hospital I called a priest, Father Van Thiel,
and accompanied him back to the dysentery ward. We
stepped up on the bench and squatted on either side of the
dying man. I held the kerosene lamp so Father Van Thiel
could see. Yesterday old Brinker had declined to receive the
last sacraments of his church, explaining, with a gesture
indicating his fellow patients:
“They’ll all say old Brinker is dying and I don’t want
that."
Now it did not matter what they said because it was the
end. Father Van Thiel unscrewed the cap of a small silver
vial containing blessed olive oil and smeared a tiny amount
on his right thumb. He told Brinker to close his eyes while
he anointed the lids and said a prayer in Latin that trans-
lates, “Through this holy unction and His most tender
mercy, may the Lord pardon thee whatsoever faults thou
hast committed by sight." Then, repeating the same prayer
but changing the last word to suit the senses of hearing,
smell, taste and touch the priest rubbed oil, in a brief sign
of the cross, on Brinker’s ears, nostrils, lips and the palms
of his hands.
When the last prayer of the rite, known as Extreme
Unction, had been said Father Van Thiel thanked me for
holding the lamp. As I stepped down from the bench and
replaced the lamp in its customary wall holder I could hear
him whispering prayers, in Dutch, to Brinker.
Straightening my aching back I took a deep breath. Im-
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mediately I wished I had not. Every cubic inch of the ward's
foul air seemed to rush into my lungs— the odors of dysen-
tery, the sickly sweet smell of beri-beri, the heavy stench of
necrotic flesh on ulcerated limbs. If we who were used to it
sometimes are nauseated, I thought, to a stranger the smell
would be appalling. I hurried outside to breathe clean air,
look up at the stars and pick out the Southern Cross. I
could not see it and figured it must be too far down in the
western heavens. So I tried to pick out Argo, the old sailing
ship. I found the stars that are Vela, the sails; but I could
not discern those that are the keel and hull. Either they,
too, were below my horizon or Argo was too complicated
for my simple astronomy. Sometimes I could find them and
other times I could not.
The scrape and clatter of wooden sandals— our prison
footgear— along the covered walk aroused me from my star-
gazing reverie and signaled that a new shift of ward attend-
ants was going on duty, replacing those whose turn ended
at midnight.
I walked into the staff room, identical in construction
with the wards. Each of us had a space twenty-seven inches
wide on the long, concrete platforms. Some of us had built
wooden frames in order to sleep level. Others, preferring the
natural slope even though they did slide downward, spread
their straw mats on the slabs. Mosquito nets were grey
blurs in the darkness. I started to crawl into mine when a
whisper from across the aisle halted me.
''Mac."
Eric Germann, the only other American prisoner and my
partner and fellow worker, was calling. I stepped over to his
bunk and sat on the edge of the bench.
"Hold out your hand," he said.
We fumbled for each other’s hands. In mine he placed
a "tailor made” cigaret. Months before there had l^en a
Red Cross issue— the first and last— of American cigarets.
He had saved one for this occasion.
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‘‘Merry Christmas," Eric said.
We shook hands. I started up, to go after a light at the
dysentery ward lamp, when an idea struck me.
“We’ll really celebrate," I said. “We’ll use a match."
One of my most precious possessions was a box of
matches preserved, in a water proof tin, for emergency use.
Opening the tin I struck a match for the first time in nearly
three years. Its flare was blindingly welcome. Ceremoniously
I lit the cigaret Eric had rolled for himself of nipa palm
leaf wrapped around raw, native tobacco, then lit my own.
We smoked in silence.
I thought of another Christmas, the one that had started
the series of adventures which landed me in Muntok Prison.
On Christmas night, 1941, Pepper Martin and I put a Japa-
nese floor guard to bed and a few hours later escaped from
Shanghai. Pepper was United Press bureau manager and I
was his assistant. With all other enemy nationals of Japan
we became prisoners in China’s busiest city when the Japa-
nese took over, the day of Pearl Harbor.
To begin at the beginning: I resigned my newspaper job
in Salt Lake City in 1939 and headed for the Orient where
I figured there was going to be a war I might cover as a
correspondent. My first stop was for ten months in Tokyo
and a job on an English language daily newspaper. Next
came Shanghai, where I landed in October, 1940, to join
United Press. When war appeared imminent Pepper and
I and Francis Lee, a former United Press man, began cast-
ing around for means of escape should the Japanese occupy
Shanghai. Chinese guerrillas agreed to send a man into the
city for us.
During the first week of Shanghai’s occupation the Japa-
nese military police, called Kempeitaiy did not arrest news-
paper correspondents. Like other American, British or Dutch
nationals, we moved around at will inside the barricaded
International Settlement. During the second week a few
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correspondents disappeared. All would be arrested eventu-
ally. We were getting jittery lest our turn should come be-
fore the guerrilla guide arrived. Our jitters increased when
a Japanese civilian guard was placed on our hotel floor to
check on movements of Americans. Although he was an old
friend and did little checking we knew our time was com-
ing. Christmas night Pepper and I took the guard to dinner,
filled him with Tom-and-Jerries, brought him back to his
hotel post at midnight, saw him to bed and retired to our
own room. The guide arrived a few hours later.
That was splendid except for one hitch. We were broke
and couldn't get the money we needed for the journey until
daylight. There was one man who might have a large sum at
four o'clock in the morning and be friend enough to lend it
to us. We rode by ricksha to a church, awakened the priest
and borrowed part of his Christmas collection.
The guide told us we would have to pass the first set of
barricades on our own and meet him at a village outside
the city. Our plan involved play-acting three drunken Ger-
mans staggering home from an all night party. Germans,
being Japanese allies, had passes permitting them to cross
the first barricades if they lived in suburbs outside the
Settlement proper. We weaved up to a sentry box and went
through a long, futile search of our pockets for the neces-
sary identity cards. The bluff worked. Grinning, the guards
waved us on.
Our guerrilla guide was waiting in the village. The Shang-
hai barricade was only a minor hurdle in our journey to
freedom. From the village where we met the guide to Free
Ghina was several hundred miles of Japanese-occupied terri-
tory and two strongly guarded “lines." We were inside an
iron triangle, formed by three railroads, of which Shanghai
was the apex. We had to cross the base. The railroads were
solidly barricaded their entire length and patrolled by
soldiers and dogs. Beyond the triangle's base was a well-
held highway between Hangchow and Nanking. Behind
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us, we knew, a search would begin as soon as we were
missed.
We traveled westward in freezing weather, by foot and
sampan, until ten days after Christmas when, to the tune
of gunfire and barking dogs, we crossed the highway and
stumbled, dirty, hungry, and vermin-ridden, into Free China.
Another twenty-four days travel brought us to Chungking
and our next assignments from United Press. Mine was to
fly immediately to Java and cover the battle for the Nether-
lands East Indies.
The battle was brief. As Java fell I fled in a ship which
was sunk in the Indian Ocean. I reached Sumatra, the
nearest land, after a long swim and six days in a lifeboat.
Three weeks of hiking barefoot along Sumatra's jungle-
fringed west coast brought me to a little harbor town where
I had planned to obtain a native sailboat and, with some
companions, escape and sail across the Indian Ocean to
Ceylon.
But the Japanese got me again, transported me across
Sumatra to the oil port of Palembang, and put me in
Palembang Jail the night of Easter Sunday, April 5, 1942.
As I walked through the jail gates I glanced up, half
expecting to see something written above them. There was
an inscription in Dutch I could not read and a date,
A.D. 1883. An alarm kept ringing in my brain, “Pm a pris-
oner! Pm a prisoner!”
I did not conceal my identity, hoping that news of my
recapture would reach Tokyo and that I might be returned
to Shanghai, or at least the Asiatic mainland, either for
punishment or— wild expectation— repatriation when Ameri-
can correspondents and diplomatic officials would be ex-
changed for their Japanese counterparts. Once on the
Asiatic mainland I hoped I could escape * again because
I knew the ropes. Naturally, I said nothing in Palembang
• The full story of my Shanghai escape, sinking and recapture is told in
Six BeUs Off Java, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1948.
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Jail about the Shanghai escape, merely gave my correct
name and occupation, believing that the Japanese Foreign
Office eventually would be informed of the capture of a
correspondent. (How wrong I was!)
After interrogation and registration on prison rolls, I was
added to the tangle of men trying to sleep amid a welter of
junk in a peculiarly smelly room. Without space on the con-
crete floor to lie down, I sat in the doorway and dozed off
while dreaming of escaping again.
Now it was Christmas, 1944. All the dreams and plans of
escape that had helped sustain my spirits through two years
and nine months of imprisonment had every one been
foiled. But I still schemed. Men without hope die.
The cigaret Eric had given me for a Christmas present
long since had been consumed as I sat on the bench in the
dark staff room. Eric had lain down. By his silence I judged
him either asleep or also reminiscing. Stiffly I rose from the
bench, fumbled at my bunk until I found my tobacco and
started for the dysentery ward and the lamp. I couldn’t
afford another match. The attendant on duty was standing
in the ward entrance.
“How’s Brinker?” I asked.
“I think he’s dead. I was just going to call someone to
check.”
I stepped up on the bench and felt Brinker’s pulse. No
pulse. The attendant handed me the lamp and I looked
into Brinker’s half-open eyes. Sightless. I touched the lids.
Not a flutter. Listened for his heart. Not a beat. Squeezed
hard with my fingers on the flesh of his upper arm. My
fingerprints remained. Held a small hand mirror to his open
mouth. Not a breath fogged it.
“He’s dead all right,” I said, and stepped down to the
floor. “Better call the doctor.”
Sleepy-eyed, the doctor came, listened with his stetho-
scope and told us we could carry Brinker out. We lifted
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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR
15
the body onto a stretcher, carried it into the bamboo shed
which served as a mortuary and put it into one of four
plank coffins. One coffin already held the body of a man
who had died just before the concert. The other two would
soon be occupied, perhaps before the day was out. Officer
Francken and two others were very low.
Back in the staff room, lying on my bunk, I filled the time
until sleep came by mentally constructing the framework
of a book that would tell the story of this prison life.
Today would be an appropriate place to begin, I thought,
because it would be a kind of key to this other world far
behind enemy lines, in a tropic backwash of war where men
long believed dead were fighting a battle of souls and minds
instead of bullets and bombs.
But, before narrating how they won or lost in their
struggles with their greatest adversaries— themselves — it
would be necessary to explain how they got here and what
they did. This would require switching back to the first
morning of imprisonment when I awakened after dozing off
in the cell doorway, dreaming of escape.
And so I have , , •
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2
Roll Call
D awn stirred the trees which made a dark
horizon beyond Palembang Jail. The desultory
voices of awakening birds sounded an ornitho-
logical overture to the day— my first day of internment,
April 6, 1942. Soon the sun peered over the east wall. Men
emerged grumpily from their cells to stand in its early rays,
hoping to melt from their flesh the imprint and from their
joints the stiffness of hours on damp cement bunks and
concrete floors.
Night had washed the sky nearly clean of clouds, giving
the sun full scope to kindle the day with brilliance. The
impact of light, glaring off cell block roofs, walls and pave-
ment walks threw every detail of the jail into sharp, painful
relief. What had been concealed by darkness last night when
I entered stood out this morning in harsh reality.
Peaked tile roofs of buildings inside the prison were
higher than the surrounding wall, so that its somber grey
stretch was visible only in sections between the cell blocks.
The wall looked about fifteen feet high and was surmounted
by another six feet or so of barbed wire curving inward at
the top like the fences around animal pits at the zoo. I was
standing inside still another barbed wire fence, perhaps
twelve feet high, which divided the hollow square of jail
yard from cell blocks around it on three sides. The fourth
side housed guardrooms, storerooms and the double iron
gates to the outside world.
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ROLL CALL
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The cell where I had spent the night was one half of a
two-compartmented building set in a corner of the main
wall. Also, it stood apart from the long cell blocks on my
side of the yard and was isolated from the nearest one by
yet another private fence of its own. Between the building
and the wall was an open-air bath tank where two men,
their skin glistening wetly in the sun, were washing. Stand-
ing outside the tank they dipped water with small hand
buckets and splashed it over themselves. I stripped and
joined them. The first bucketful was a cold shock; the sec-
ond pleasantly cool; and the third a delight. We dried our-
selves as swimmers do when they climb from a pool, skin-
ning water from our flesh with the palms of our hands and
letting the sun do the rest.
Donning my scanty clothing— a pair of shorts and a shirt
—I stood with other men looking through the fence into the
yard where a square of grass made an oasis in this desert
of barbed wire, stone and iron. A shaggy hedge grew along
the narrow section of fence directly in front of our build-
ing. I wondered aloud who had planted it and tended it
during the years it must have struggled to survive in such
inhospitable surroundings.
“Women,’' said a scrawny, sarong-clad individual who
had just emerged from the other half of the two-room
building.
“That’s exactly what I said,” he continued in reply to
my look of incredulity. “Native women planted it. Female
prisoners.”
My informant introduced himself as an English merchant
seaman and a veteran of Palembang Jail, having been there
a week. He said he had been told this isolated cell block
used to serve the dual purpose of jail clinic and women’s
quarters. Female prisoners lived in the cell from which he
had just come. The place where I had spent the night was
the clinic. That explained a peculiar odor I had been won-
dering about.
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The hedge was high enough to have screened small
statured Malay women from the gaze of men in the yard.
A tiny patch of grass sheltered in its shadow. I stepped onto
it, savoring its tensile crispness between my toes. Directly
across the yard was the highest building inside the walls.
Smoke rose from behind its steeply pitched roof and through
its doors could be seen flames in open hearths. The kitchen.
The sailor touched me on the shoulder, cleared his throat
apologetically and in a half whisper, perhaps so other men
standing around wouldn’t hear, asked,
“I say, mate, have you any tobacco?”
“A little.”
“In that room are some sick men who haven’t smoked
for days.”
I followed him into the room from which he had come.
Its interior was nearly filled by a knee-high cement platform,
the width of the room and seven or eight feet deep, ending
against the back wall. Six men lay shoulder to shoulder on
it, their feet toward the door. Two other men lay on straw
mats in the narrow floor space between the platform, or
bench, and the front wall. The former women’s quarters
now had been converted into the jail hospital. The sailor
proudly announced his good news.
“Here’s a gentleman will share his tobacco.”
A chorus of appreciation filled the room. Three patients
sat up immediately. One of them, a huge-barrelled fat man
with a beard which recalled pictures of King Henry VIII,
smiled and said,
“Luckily for you, not all of us smoke.”
A thin man with a doleful face and a “let-me-tell-you-
about-my-operation” voice asked if by any chance I had
some milk.
“My ulcer must have milk,” he whined, “or my days are
really numbered.”
“Sorry,” I told him. “Tojo confiscated my cow.”
“Well, then, I will appreciate a bit of your tobacco.”
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ROLL CALL
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While distributing what remained of my tobacco and
rolling a cigaret for myself I asked how it happened that
all the patients were Englishmen. They said they were from
ships sunk or captured off Sumatra's east coast while fleeing
Singapore. The fat man, who looked to be in his early
thirties and must have weighed 240 pounds, introduced
himself as W. Probyn Allen, Far Eastern representative of
an English drug firm.
‘'I don’t smoke,” he said, declining tobacco, “but you
may bring me a drink of water if you will.”
I fetched my water bottle from next door.
The sailor went outside to get a light, returned and
lighted our cigarets. The first inhalation of smoke went
down my throat like a rasp, searched out the empty crevices
of my stomach where food should have been and dispersed
comfortingly until it seemed to touch and bless every sensate
fiber of my being. Thoughts of no more tobacco disturbed
me, so I took only a few drags then sniped the cigaret for
a final smoke after breakfast.
At that moment a sudden clanging burst on my ears.
Sound waves filled the jail with metallic racket, richochet-
ing from wall to wall, bouncing off iron doors, battling with
the sun’s glare for violent attention. When my neck un-
shrank, my shoulders sank back to normal posture and my
eyes opened, I stepped to the doorway and looked toward
the front gate whence the clamor came. A Japanese soldier
was rattling a metal bar around the inside of an iron triangle
of the type familiar to American ranchers who for genera-
tions have been summoned to meals by similar dinner bells.
But, though the instruments were similar, the effects dif-
fered. When the dinner bell rings outside an American
ranch kitchen, the results are music in the mountain air
because trees and open country soften the strident notes.
In Palembang Jail every blow on the triangle hurled percus-
sion waves onto hostile surfaces which magnified the sound’s
intensity. When the last ear-shattering note splintered into
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BY EASTERN WINDOWS
silence, my jumbled thoughts assorted themselves and
asked why such clamor to announce breakfast. I learned it
was not breakfast but the signal summoning prisoners to
morning roll call.
Men stood in double lines on the walks outside their
respective cell blocks. The sergeant guard commander,
flanked by two tin-helmeted soldiers carrying bayoneted
rifles at ready and followed by a fat, sad-faced Dutch inter-
preter, took the roll call. Counting began at the kitchen
across the yard and proceeded counterclockwise around the
jail toward the hospital which thus would be the last to be
counted. Roll call followed a fixed ritual. As guards arrived
in front of each cell block, prisoners bowed to them and the
soldiers saluted in return. A leader for each block reported
the number in his lines. Guards then verified the report by
counting, after which captives again bowed and captors
saluted.
As we stood silently waiting our turn I studied the men
within vision. About half wore only shorts. Some were
barefooted, others shod. Their skins varied in hue from the
deep coffee of the darkest Indo-Europeans up through many
shades to the flat whiteness of sedentary business men whose
chests had not felt an unobstructed sunbeam since they
were children. Between those extremes were dark browns,
light browns, yellow browns; tans from saddle to atabrine;
whites from the healthy glow of youth to the tired, large-
pored flaccidness of age. Since all were newcomers and thus
only recently had taken to living shirtless, there were many
assorted stages of sunburn, ranging from the delicate pink
of a first blush to painful crimson. Nearly all necks and
wrists had well defined rings marking collar and cuff lines.
Physically the men ranged from thin to very fat; from short
to tall; from runty, round-shouldered, pot-bellied torsos to
the strong, virile proportions of a men’s underwear ad.
One physical characteristic predominated. They were
well nourished. Even the thin ones were thin in a natural
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ROLL CALL
21
way. Until interned, the thin ones had missed no more
meals than the fattest man in line. I wondered how long
they would continue to be well nourished. My misgivings
concerning the future were deep and black. I thought it was
going to be a long war and that many prisoners captured in
the early stages would not be living at the end. For this was
tropical Sumatra where fever and disease would thrive
unless checked by constant medical care and proper nour-
ishment. There was little likelihood of either in a Japanese
prison. ,
Rainswept Sumatra straddles the equator and with other
islands of the Malay archipelago divides the Indian Ocean
from the South China and Java seas. A jungle-clad moun-
tain chain sprawls along its thousand-mile west coast, on
the southern tip of which my lifeboat landed; while the
east coast is a vast, steaming plain of swamps and turgid
water courses. Palembang lies at the inner edge of the
swamps and fifty-four miles up the crocodile-infested Moesi
river. Two great refineries of Shell and Standard Oil are
near the city’s outskirts, at the termini of pipe lines from
interior oil fields. Palembang also is a trading center through
which move tobacco, tea, coffee, rubber, coal, palm oil and
other bounties of nature that make Sumatra rich.
Palembang was a city centuries before the Dutch arrived.
Historians have pushed back the curtain of its antiquity
to the Sriwidjayan Empire that flourished for nearly a thou-
sand years until it was conquered in the fourteenth century
A.D. by the Hindu Madjapahit Empire of Java. But the Mad-
japahits crumbled and most of Java and Sumatra was con-
verted to the religion of Mohammed. The Dutch arrived in
the seventeenth century, obtained a concession in Palem-
bang and converted it to colonial capitalism. In the last
quarter of the nineteenth century the Dutch built high-
walled Palembang Jail to hold native malefactors. The Japa-
nese arrived in February, 1942, and in March they removed
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the native prisoners and replaced them with Dutch and
British.
Another notation was added to Palembang’s long history
when the jail received its first American prisoner, me. Now
I was being counted in my first roll call line.
From that morning of April 6, 1942, when a crowd of
well fleshed men answered ib first summons, to an August
afternoon in 1945 when a group of shambling skeletons
obeyed its last command, the roll call bell dominated my
existence. It rang in the dawn of morning, at high noon
and in the dark of night. It summoned men to stand in line
for water, for food, for tobacco; for announcements, for
meetings and for funerals . . . especially for funerals.
The bell rang so frequently for so many different pur-
poses in the various jails and camps where I lived until
freedom came, that a bell code was necessary ... a certain
number of rings for this, another number for that. First
there would be an admonitory rattling as the metal ringer
was twirled around the triangle . . . clangety-clang-clang-
clang. Clangety-clang-clang-clang. A pause. Then the meas-
ured strokes— one, two, three; or one, two, three, four; or
one, two, three, four, five, six; or maybe only one.
Quickly we came to anticipate, even to pray for, the
routine calls— to collect food, to line up for boiled water,
or tea, or a handful of peanuts, or a teaspoon of palm oil.
Sometimes there were phenomenal, red letter, hallelujah
days when we lined up for 100 grams (3V2 ounces) of sugar
and 25 grams (less than an ounce) of salt per man. Such
were the rings which regulated our lives down to the last
detail. The unexpected rings were the ones which threw
chills into us— the roll calls which rang in the night, sum-
moning us from sleep to stand in the damp air during the
long, exacting process of counting to determine who was
missing, who had gotten out in a desperate smuggling en-
deavor to find food and get back in again undetected. I
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ROLL CALL
23
was one of those who engaged in food-smuggling, but I
managed always to get back in before roll call. Some did
not.
Sometimes the bell chattered angrily to announce an in-
fraction of prison rules and sometimes it tolled slowly,
signaling the grave gang to carry away another body.
Roll calls had a sequence in avoirdupois and number as
well as time, while the once well nourished men slowly
changed from overweight to underweight, from under-
weight to emaciation, from emaciation to skin over bones,
eyes in skulls, caricatures, corpses.
Cell block by cell block the guards counted their way
until they came finally to the line in which I stood. The
interpreter relayed the sergeant’s command.
“Attention.”
We came to attention.
“Bow.”
We bowed. The guards saluted.
“How many?” asked the interpreter.
“Twenty-three,” said a man on the end of the line. “Eight
inside and fifteen outside.”
The sergeant counted us outside then walked to the
barred window of the hospital cell and peered at the eight
men lying inside. Then he counted us again, calling the num-
bers aloud in Japanese and stabbing his finger at us with
each count:
“Ic/ii, ni, san, shi, go . .
Then the interpreter spoke again.
“Attention.”
The command was superfluous because we had been at
attention all the time, but he had to say something. Oblig-
ingly we straightened our shoulders even more and the
interpreter said:
“Bow.”
We bowed again. Guards saluted, about-faced and
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marched to the front gate. One of them picked up the bell
ringer and struck the triangle, then whirled the ringer around
in a long, jangling rattle that bounced off walls and iron
doors, violated my ear drums, convulsed hands into fists,
propelled a shiver up to my scalp and prickled there until
the ringing stopped.
My first roll call was over.
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5
Ode to Phoebus
I TURNED hopeful eyes toward the kitchen when
roll call ended. Breakfast should be soon. Instead,
however, there was a reshuffling of men to make
room for more prisoners. My companions were removed
from the room in which I had spent the night, leaving me
alone with two chairs and a table covered with dusty,
gummy bottles and tins of ointment— remains of the pre-
war clinic. Claiming they had established prior rights, my
erstwhile roommates took with them most of the junk
which had littered the place. One thing they left, however,
was a piece of jute sacking about ten feet long and half as
wide. It would serve as a mattress until something better
came along. I laid it out in the sun while I explored the
area surrounding the bath tank. In a heap of rubbish I
found a chipped, blue enamel dish with a small hole in the
bottom, a handleless spoon and a half of a coconut shell
someone had started to polish, then discarded when a tri-
angular section broke off the edge. Poor as they were I now
had eating utensils. The next thing was something to eat.
Gates in the barbed wire fence were opened after roll
call and men circulated at will inside the jail. I crossed the
yard to the kitchen. It looked more like a foundry. Instead
of stoves or ovens there was a row of round, open hearths
on top of which sat huge, iron kettles or smoke-blackened
containers which were large oil drums with the tops cut off.
Long metal tongs and pokers and axes and saws hung on
the walls. Smoke rose to the ceiling and theoretically escaped
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26
through wide roof vents. The volunteer kitchen workers
were nearly as smoke-blackened as the pots over which they
labored.
Tops of the steaming cauldrons were too high to look into,
so I asked one of the cooks what was boiling.
'‘Water/’ he said.
“For coffee?”
“We haven’t seen coffee since we came here.”
“Then why boil so much water?”
“Tea. We’re having tea for breakfast.”
“And what else?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing else. Rice and vegetables haven’t
arrived yet. Only the Japs know when they will and I doubt
if they really know.”
I left the kitchen, thinking how comforting it would be
if, at times like this, we had cuds to chew on between meals.
A group of white-robed men sitting on a wooden bench
in front of a cell block attracted my attention. Walking
over I introduced myself to the first man on the bench and
met the Catholic Bishop of Palembang.
“Pleased to know you,” he said. “Have you any tobacco?”
“Not a shred,” I replied, thinking ‘this fellow is surely
a fast operator.’
“Good,” smiled Bishop H. M. Mekkelholt, “then I can
make you a present.”
Fishing in his cassock he brought out the remains of a
lempeng, the Malay name for a quantity of native tobacco
fiber about the size and consistency of a shredded wheat
biscuit. Pulling it apart he gave me half. I declined to take
so much but he insisted, explaining,
“Americans were most kind to me when I was in your
country last year. This is a token of appreciation.”
At that moment the Japanese sergeant guard commander
strode up shouting angrily. He delivered a long harangue
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ODE TO PHOEBUS
most of it unintelligible; but the general idea was plain. I
was an American and therefore in a special category of
wickedness. My cell had been cleared so I could be kept
in solitary confinement. I was to remain there and not
mingle with other men. He seized my shoulder, turned me
around and marched me back to my cell. It wasn't really
a cell in the same sense of others in the jail because it had
no sleeping platform and the door was an ordinary wooden
one instead of a barred iron gate.
He closed the door but did not lock it. After a while I
walked to the barred window beside the door and looked
out. Two guards were sitting at a table on the covered walk
near the main gate but the sergeant was not in sight. I
opened the door and walked out into the small area behind
the hospital fence. A man was at the bath tank cleaning his
teeth with a large, black stiff brush of a type not generally
associated with teeth.
“How does it taste?" I asked.
“Inky," he replied.
“Where's the typewriter it came with?"
“In my cell. Fellow brought it in with him."
The brush wielder, a sunburned man clad only in a pair
of black shorts held up with a drawstring, introduced him-
self.
“Burt," he said. “Gordon Burt. Late of His Majesty's
Engineers, Malaya."
Burt was a gaunt but wiry New Zealander with little
knots of muscle where they would do the most good. Thick
black eyebrows and a hawk nose frowned over a stubby
black beard. He finished his tooth-cleaning operations, re-
moved his shorts and started splashing water over himself.
“My third bath this morning," he shouted. “I can't get
too much of this water."
Burt said he was the only survivor of a group of British
engineers who, on the last leg of a run from Singapore to
Palembang, were chugging up the Moesi river in a launch
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BY EASTERN WINDOWS
when they ran smack into a Japanese gunboat. That was
their first intimation that Palembang had been captured.
The launch was blown out of the water. Uninjured, Burt
swam to shore, pulled himself up in the weeds and lay there
until sundown. He hid for ten days in the jungle but hun-
ger and mosquitoes finally drove him out. He waved down
another Japanese river craft and was taken to Palembang,
stripped naked and left for two weeks in a guardhouse cell.
Finally, he was given the pair of black shorts he was wear-
ing and brought to the jail.
The clangety-clang-clang of roll call bell interrupted
our conversation.
'‘Food,” said Burt, “have to grab my dish and get in line.”
He jumped into his shorts without bothering to dry him-
self, dashed through the fence gate which was left open so
men could use the bath tank, and ran toward his cell. But
Burt’s food guess had been wrong. The bell did not signal
dinner but rang to summon prisoners who had arrived the
night before to claim their luggage.
On arriving in Palembang we had been compelled to
leave our luggage in the street where we had disembarked
from a river ferry. The Japanese had promised it would be
delivered to us later. We had not believed them but here
it was. My luggage, acquired during three weeks of wander-
ing on the west coast before the Japanese patrol found me,
consisted of:
One bicycle tire inner tube picked up on a hunch it would
prove handy.
Two bottles of beer.
A small quantity of quinine.
A bottle of iodine.
Half a dozen paper-backed books found in the house
where I met the Dutch policeman F’rancken who had the
cognac.
One mosquito net and two white bed sheets found in
another house where I had spent a night.
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29
The mosquito net was wrapped around the beer bottles.
The sheets, folded and knotted, enclosed the entire bundle.
As each man claimed his luggage it was searched by a
Japanese ofEcer. Knives and razors were confiscated. The
officer and guards offered to buy any wrist watches prisoners
were willing to sell. That surprised me. I thought they would
simply take them. When the officer came to my beer bottles
he held them up to the light, laughed and passed them
to me.
Enroute back to my cell I noticed that the door to a
storeroom just outside the fence gate from the bath tank
was slightly ajar. After depositing my bundle I returned to
the gate, stepped through when guards were not looking,
pushed open the storeroom door and slipped inside, leaving
the door slightly ajar. The sliver of light through the door
crack disclosed a pile of metal chains and leg irons and a
small tin trunk.
The trunk lid opened easily. Inside was clothing of the
type peculiarly half eastern, half western, affected by many
Malays who wear trousers on the street and sarongs in their
homes. All the articles were too small for me, but a pair
of white trousers offered the possibility of being cut down
to shorts. Another garment, which looked like the upper
half of a Mother Hubbard, would serve as a shirt. The next
articles selected were a yellow Malay waist sash, two ordi-
nary neckties and a tiny wooden container holding a stick
of menthol.
Closing the trunk I explored the room further and picked
up a dirt-stiffened blanket and a bath water dipper. The
trousers, shirt, sash and neckties I stuffed inside the dipper.
Then I opened the door quickly, closed it behind me and
stepped through the fence gate. A few days later I again
visited the room, found the tin trunk empty and so appro-
priated it to use for my growing possessions.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner were served simultaneously
in midafternoon. I joined the food queue of two hundred-
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odd men and after a seemingly interminable time held out
my chipped enamel dish for the ration of rice and soggy
vegetables. To my horror the dish was too small. The
servers told me to return later for the remainder of my
share. Precious liquid off the vegetables leaked out the hole
in the bottom of the dish. I reproached myself for not hav-
ing brought the broken coconut shell as well as the dish.
Quickly I ate the meal and hurried back for more, but food
servers only shrugged sympathetically and pointed to the
empty food drums.
That night, as I was lying on my sheets and gunny sack-
ing, the door creaked open and a white robed figure slipped
inside.
“Good evening,” said a voice plainly in difiBculties with
the English tongue. “I am Father Filing.”
I rose from the sack and we shook hands.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“They do not lock the fence gates until ten o’clock.”
“What about the guards? You took a chance on coming
in here.”
“Took a chance?” he repeated. “What is that meaning?”
I explained. He listened carefully, repeated the words,
laughed, and said,
“Thank you. What is life without taking chances?”
We were friends from that moment. I decided it was a
good time to drink the beer and Father Filing agreed, A
heavy nail solidly impacted in the door frame solved the
bottle opening problem. I filled the coconut shell nearly up
to the break in the side and handed it to him. He raised it
and said,
“Your health.”
I drank from the bottle. The beer was warm but had a
pleasant bite. I asked if there were any Chinese in Palem-
bang.
“Many,” Father Elling said.
“Do you know any who would help a foreigner?”
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“If it is possible."
I had unlimited confidence in Chinese courage and in-
genuity. The right Chinese, I felt sure, could help me
escape to the sea and a sailboat.
Father Elling drank quickly, almost as if it were a draft
of medicine. Months later I learned he disliked beer, I
asked why he had drunk mine if he disliked it.
“Because I was afraid you would be offended if I did not,"
he said. “You were so proud of the bottles."
Next morning after roll call prisoners were ordered to line
up in the yard, fully clothed, for inspection. Fully clothed
meant shirts, shorts or long trousers and footgear of what-
ever description we possessed. New Zealander Burt stood in
line wearing only his brief, black shorts. A guard, through
the interpreter, ordered him to go and get dressed.
“I have nothing to put on," Burt said. “The blighters
threw me in here just like this. Tell them I have no shirt
or pants or even shoes."
The guard commander swelled up and chattered angrily,
A fellow prisoner offered to lend a shirt.
“No," said Burt, “I want one of my own. They can give
me a shirt if they will."
The commander ordered Burt to borrow the necessary
garment or be beaten on the spot. Burt capitulated but,
because he was still barefooted, was ordered to change places
with a man in a back row.
During the verbal exchange we gathered that a high Japa-
nese officer was coming to inspect us and we must put on a
good appearance. After carefully scrutinizing the lines to see
that all were properly clothed the commander ordered us
to stand at rigid attention. We stood.
Standing attention for prolonged periods can be torment.
The sun climbed higher in the sky, probing our flesh with
burning fingers as one hour passed, then two. Occasionally
a man would faint, causing a small, welcome flurry of
commotion as he was dragged from line and placed in the
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shade. A tall, lean, red-faced Dutch planter named Dyken
began retching and vomiting with strained, painful noises
that made us flinch. Conspicuous by the red trimming on
his cassock and by the impassive dignity of his carriage.
Bishop Mekkelholt stood among his priests. He seemed
impervious to the sun, the jail and the Japanese.
Toward noon the high officer arrived. Then I heard for
the first time another sound which was to become part of
the routine noises of prison life. The sound was a command,
'‘kiotsukel” meaning ''attention!” and was bellowed by the
gate guards whenever an officer appeared. While shrieking,
they would present arms. The cry they uttered doing it
sounded like a combination yell, snarl and vomit. When I
first heard it, standing in line waiting for inspection, I
thought Dyken was expiring with one long, horrid death
rattle. Then I realized the officer had arrived.
He came through the gate with a swagger that might
have befitted Napoleon on a triumphant entry into Paris.
His collar bore the single gold star of a major-general.
"Kiotsuke!” shouted the guard commander at us.
We stiffened our shoulders.
"Bow,” commanded the interpreter.
We bowed.
The general surveyed us, slowly turning his head as his
eyes traveled around the three sided square we had formed
in the yard. One hand rested on his sword, the other hung
straight down at his side. His polished leather boots
clumped heavily as he walked leisurely around the inside of
our lines. Aides hovered behind him. He paused in front of
Bishop Mekkelholt, looked him over, asked the guard com-
mander a few questions and walked on. Returning to the
gate he stood for a moment watching us while we bowed
again. He returned the bow with a salute, about-faced,
clumped out the gate and the inspection ended. It had
lasted perhaps five minutes. We had waited for it hours in
the sun.
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Back in my solitary cell I lay down to rest my aching
back and legs and clear my head of sun dancing vertigo.
Neither the aches nor the vertigo would leave. Presently
the room became too cool and, shivering, I returned to the
sun to get warm but instead I grew colder and the shivering
increased. Someone had said there were two doctors in
jail. I asked a passerby to fetch one and returned to my room
and lay down. The dinner bell rang and I could hear the
rattle and bang of tin dishes as men queued up for their
rations. Food no longer interested me. At last a voice said,
“You sent for me?"
Opening my eyes I looked at a pair of legs encased in
white, knee-high stockings and white shorts. Turning my
throbbing head slightly on the sack so that I could look
higher I saw the legs supported a fat, tight paunch. Rolling
over on my back so that I looked above the melon-like
bulge I saw a sharp face with a grey goatee. I sat up.
“Lie down," said the man, “I am Dr. Hollweg."
“Have any trouble with the guards?" I asked, thinking
that was why it had taken him so long to come. He
snorted.
“Pigs," he said, “nothing but pigs."
He thrust a thermometer into my mouth and launched
into a long, excited recital of how the Japanese came to
Palembang. Eventually he removed the thermometer,
frowned at it and shook his head.
“How high?" I asked.
“Nearly forty."
That puzzled me, so I asked again.
“Forty," he repeated.
I thought he was making some kind of Dutch Joke so I
replied in kind, saying,
“Only eight above freezing, eh? Soon I will congeal.”
He looked at me sharply, without replying, opened a
small bottle and shook out two white pills.
“Take these," he said. “I will return after roll call."
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“No kidding, Doc,” I insisted, “what was my tempera-
ture?”
“I said nearly forty,” he snapped, and walked out.
That was my introduction to Centigrade, and to Dr.
Hollweg who, I later learned, was a nephew of ill-famed
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, German Chancellor in
World War I. Von Bethmann-Hollweg, after German
troops invaded Belgium, termed a “mere scrap of paper”
the treaty guaranteeing inviolate Belgium's frontiers.
I once asked Dr. Hollweg, who said he himself served
with the medical corps of the French army in World War I,
if he had ever spoken to his uncle about those historically
notorious words.
“Yes,” said the doctor, “when he was visiting my family
after the war, in 1920; but he only smiled and said there
would be another war in about twenty-five years, when
Germany had rearmed. And then ean you guess what he
said?”
“No,” I replied. “What did he say?”
“ ‘Germany will fight again,’ he told me, ‘but you need
not worry because Germany never, never, never will invade
Holland.’ ”
The chills and fever had gone when Dr. Hollweg re-
turned after roll call. He said my illness was malaria.
“You must have been exposed before you came here,”
he said. “There is no malaria in Palembang.”
I asked him how long the attaek would last.
“Until you recover.”
“How long will that be?”
“My dear, the Japanese pigs took my crystal ball. Per-
haps one week. Perhaps two.”
Changing the subject I asked how many Dutchmen were
in jail and how many English.
“Do not call us Dutchmen. We are Hollanders.”
I corrected myself.
“How many Hollanders?”
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“My dear, go to sleep. Tomorrow I will come again."
Next morning two Hollanders, as fat as they were cheer-
ful, came in carrying a heavy wooden door between them.
“Your bed,” they said. “It is better than the cement
floor.”
One of them, Holscher, had been an officer on the ship
which was sunk under me in the Indian Ocean. I asked him
how he obtained the door for it obviously had been removed
from a cell. Holscher laughed and said,
“It spoiled the view from our club house.”
I wondered again about the guards. Actually they proved
indifferent to what we did inside so long as we were quiet
and answered roll calls promptly. Within a few days the
guards forgot me completely and visitors came and went
at will.
One morning an Englishman walked in bearing a cup
of coffee, the first I had tasted since capture. He introduced
himself as Curran-Sharp, a planter from Malaya. Because
the patients in the hospital were all English, he said, he
had volunteered to fetch their food daily.
“Have you met Paddy West?” he asked.
“No, who is he?”
“The Irish doctor here,” said Curran-Sharp, enunciating
with the slow, precise diction of a schoolmaster lecturing
to a class. “He was my estate doctor. Excellent fellow.”
“What is an estate doctor?”
“Excuse me, please,” he said, “while I light my pipe.”
He started for the door. I told him to wait, that I would
reward his cup of coffee with a match.
“Save it for the night when there is no sun,” he said.
“Matches are precious things. Watch.”
Standing just outside the door he took from his shirt
pocket a monocle which he used as a sun-glass, holding it
so that the captured sunbeams were focussed on a tiny
scrap of paper placed over the bowl of his pipe. After a con-
siderable wait he was rewarded by a curl of smoke rising
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from the paper. The curl became an infinitesimal flame
and he began puffing on the pipe stem. The tobacco lit. He
puffed furiously until smoke finally was sucked through the
stem and blown with impatient blue-grey spurts, out of the
side of his mouth. Triumphantly he returned inside and
sat down.
“Wonderful thing, the sun,” he said. “I have composed a
poem to it.”
“Yes?”
“I call it Ode to Phoebus.”
“How does it go?”
He needed no more encouragement, but began,
**Hear my cry, Phoebus, strongly defend me.
All my needs comfort, all thy aid lend me.
Always through daytime generously send me
Sunshine quite cloudless.*’
Rising to his feet and puffing vigorously on the pipe be-
tween lines in order to keep the tobacco burning, Curran-
Sharp declaimed five more stanzas, describing how Phoebus’
rays, through the instrumentality of spectacle lenses, kept
his pipe burning. The ode ended in a paean about burnt
offerings and a plea for “quintals of good ’backey, lit by
thy splendour.”
I asked him what kind of tobacco he used, because it
smelled so strange.
“It is not tobacco,” he said. “It is dried hedge leaves.”
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Dysentery and Palemhang
Bottom— No Relation
R ain clouds, rolling with the west monsoon,
piled up mighty battlements in the mid-after-
. noon sky over Palembang. Like a searching dog
snuffling on a scent, exploratory puffs of wind blew over the
jail wall, whirled dust in the yard, stirred clothes drying on
lines and fences and the little plot of grass. Soon the rain
would come, drumming violently on tile roofs, splattering
like ricocheting machine gun bullets from cement walks
and walls, slanting through barred cell windows and doors.
Except for the wind's huffing and desultory clattering from
the kitchen where workers cleaned up after the noon meal,
the jail was quiet. It was the siesta hour.
Straightening to ease the crimp in my back I removed
my hands from the reeking waters in which I was washing
scarce and precious rags used to clean dysentery patients,
and studied the clouds. Boiling masses, the color of angry
surf, advanced across the sky ahead of the darker storm cen-
ter and had reached a point almost directly overhead, so
that the heavens were divided. It was as though towering
cliffs at the edge of a mountain lake were trembling from
some mighty, inner upheaval and at any moment would
collapse and fall. Rain would hit when grey spilled into
blue— in about half an hour, I estimated. There was just
time to finish the few rags left in the tin.
37
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Beside me where I sat on the concrete walk in front of
the jail hospital was a pile ready for rinsing in a disinfectant
which smelled like creosote. Disinfectant was one of the
few things our Japanese captors gave us for the jam-packed
cell block we had transformed into a sick bay. The rags had
been carefully cut from clothing donated by prisoners from
their own backs. Consequently, they had to be used over
and over again. Washing dysentery rags at first had been a
revolting task but we soon lost our squeamishness. They
were washed during the siesta hour— the only daylight
period when necessary receptacles were not being used for
other purposes.
I finished the last rag, emptied the wash tin’s slimy con-
tents into a slop bucket, scrubbed the tin, refilled it with
fresh water, replaced the rags and put the bucket on a fire.
The cloths would be sterilized by boiling and afterward
spiked to dry on the barbed wire fence separating the hos-
pital cell block from the jail yard proper.
Glancing at the sky I saw the battlemented clouds were
spilling into the blue. Rain was almost upon us but I calcu-
lated there was still time for a quick bath. Wrapping what
passed for a towel around my waist I walked over to the
low concrete water tank between the hospital and the wall,
dipped a bucket of water and, holding it aloft, let the liquid
cascade over me. Delicious. At that moment the wind
stopped playing around and surged over the high wall in a
steady flow bearing scattered rain drops.
“Rain!” I shouted. “Rain! Rain!”
The cry was taken up by men who swarmed from cells
to rescue drying garments. I laughed until, remembering
my mosquito net, I deserted the bath tank, dashed into
the yard, still clad only in my birthday suit, gathered up the
net and fled into the hospital clinic where I lived and
worked dressing wounds and ulcers on the skins of fellow
prisoners. Seconds later struck the kind of cloudburst known
in the Indies as a “Sumatran.” For thirty minutes it pun-
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DYSENTERY AND PALEMBANG BOTTOM 39
ished us, beating with a steady thunder which obliterated
all but shouted conversation. Men who, because of over-
crowding, had to live out on the covered walks, retreated
into neighboring cells with their possessions and, with the
cell occupants, withdrew as far as possible from doors and
windows to avoid flying spray. Soon water was pouring
through roof leaks and those with bedding underneath
cursed and tried to find dry spots. Almost as quickly as it
began, the rain diminished to a drizzle, to scattered drops,
to nothing. Clouds moved eastward, unveiling the sun.
Soon the rain was returning to heaven in the form of steam.
Sumatra was as notorious for steaming humidity as for
violent rains. Long ago, on first landing there, I had de-
cided that if the humidity were a few degrees higher birds
would need fins instead of wings.
During the six months that had passed since the morn-
ing of my first roll call, over two hundred new prisoners
had been crammed into the jail. The storerooms next to
the guardhouse had been cleaned of their chains, leg irons
and the junk of years to make room. Those for whom no
additional space could be found spilled over onto the out-
side walks. Most newcomers were from Malaya, shipwrecked
Englishmen or Australians who had swum or floated ashore
on Sumatra’s east coast and adjacent islands. They had
come to Palembang after two months of forced labor on
little food and no medical care. I was just recovering from
the malaria attack when they arrived. A special roll call
rang in midafternoon of April 1 5th to announce them.
When the bell rang the yard was cleared, fence gates
were closed and locked and, while we watched through the
barbed wire, they straggled through the front gate. I won-
dered if we looked as disreputable when we arrived as did
these ragged, sun-blistered newcomers. Some hobbled, hang-
ing to men on either side. Others limped on canes or
crutches. Some were carried on homemade stretchers. As
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the stretchers passed through the gates, a whisper, like a
little wind, blew from the still forms, ran along the lines of
incoming men until it reached us behind the fence. The
whisper said, “DYSENTERY!"
Dysentery was a dreadful word and a mortal enemy. We
feared it like the plague. We had been thankful that dysen-
tery had not visited Palembang Jail. We had taken every
possible precaution, in our confined and crowded circum-
stances, to avoid it. Now it was coming in on stretchers
through the gate. The stretchers were laid in the middle of
the yard. Guards gave them a wide berth as they counted
the men, who lined up along the fences for inspection, and
searched their bundles. The Japanese feared dysentery as
intensely as did we.
Inspecting the 162 men took so long I returned to my
bunk but was summoned from it by a man who called
to me,
“There’s an American out here."
I hurried out. My informer indicated a man standing in
line with his back to me. He was a big, well built fellow in
fantastically patched shorts and shirt which did not con-
ceal his powerful neck, broad shoulders and slim hips. Be-
low the shorts was a pair of well muscled legs. Heavy Aus-
tralian army shoes shod his feet and on his head was a small,
tight fitting, black stocking cap which caused me to tag him
in my mind as a merchant seaman.
Reaching through the fence I tapped his shoulder. He
turned and I was looking into a pair of harsh, blue-grey
eyes. A scraggly, sandy colored beard covered his face but
not enough to hide a prominent jaw and a wide, but thin-
lipped mouth. My first impression was that I wouldn’t want
to meet him in a dark alley.
“I’m the other American here," I said.
His hard eyes lighted, the wide mouth grinned and his
whole face was transformed into the rugged features of a
good guy as he thrust his hand through the wire and we
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DYSENTERY AND PALEMBANG BOTTOM 41
shook. A guard bellowed at us and we did not speak
further.
Later, after the neweomers had been officially added to
our midst, he came into my cell and handed me a nipa leaf
cigaret. I was about to light it when I noticed he had none.
“What about you?”
“Just finished one,” he replied.
Some time later I learned he hadn’t had a smoke for
days but had scrounged the one he gave me with a plea
that “there’s a sick American in there who looks like he
needs a cigaret.”
He proved to be a 30-year-old brewmaster, not a seaman,
named Eric Germann. New York was his home. He had
been called to Singapore shortly before the war’s outbreak
to help step-up production of beer for troops brought in
to strengthen Malaya’s defenses. We became close friends
and, eventually, partners in a food smuggling enterprise to
which Eric’s muscles heavily contributed. Food smuggling
was accomplished by getting out at night, trading goods for
food with native Indonesians and getting back in again. It
was a dangerous means of avoiding starvation but it worked
—except for those who were caught, Eric and I became
members of a little band of food smugglers whose adven-
tures appear later in this story.
The new prisoners, with their wounds and dysentery,
urgently required some kind of hospitalization. G. F. West,
a 38-year-old, six-foot-three-inch Dublin Irishman, whom
Poet Curran-Sharp had referred to as “my estate doctor,”
took charge of the hospital. Although this was Dr. Holl-
weg’s home ground, the sick men were all Britishers and
West naturally, and by means of his innate qualities of
leadership, became the senior doctor. He was a lieutenant-
colonel in the British medical corps and a casualty of the
battle for Malaya, suffering machine gun bullet wounds
which clipped off one finger and part of another of his
right hand and pierced both his legs.
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He turned the sick bay next to my solitary cell into a
dysentery ward and moved the patients there into my quar-
ters which henceforth were called the clinic. Together, the
two cells became Palembang Jail Hospital. As men in the
clinic recovered they moved into other cells in the jail.
However, W. Probyn Allen and I stayed as assistants to
the doctors. I became a “dresser,” swabbing and bandaging
wounds and ever increasing tropic skin sores.
The universal treatment for skin sores, no matter on what
part of the anatomy, was soaking in hot water, followed
by removal of dead tissue and bandaging. Ingenious handi-
craft workers had fashioned metal receptacles in which a
man could sit and soak his festered bottom, if that was
where the sores were; or dunk his hands, feet or elbows in
smaller containers. While it lasted, we put potassium per-
manganate in the water and after that a solution of caustic
soda. The solution was extracted from wood ashes by soak-
ing twenty-four hours in water then draining off the liquid
and straining it through a cloth. When our soap supply
ended, the solution also was used to wash clothes.
Half an hour’s soaking prepared a patient for “dressing.”
With surgical scissors and forceps I removed dead flesh
from live tissue and treated the wounds with salves we
made ourselves from coconut oil, rock sulphur or salicylic
acid crystals. We were able to obtain the compounds and
a few other ointments and medicines from sources outside
the jail.
Sores and ulcers were not our only skin troubles. Various
itches and a variety of impetigo the Dutch called monkey-
pox was common. Herbert Smallwood, a broad, thick-set
cockney seaman with a black handlebar moustache, sharply
pointed on the ends, barrel chest, the arms and legs of a
gorilla and hammer-toed feet, was our most monkey-pox
afflicted customer. In bulk Smallwood was only a few
pounds lighter than Allen. He perspired so copiously he
always reminded me of a sea lion just emerging from the
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deep. When monkey-pox got him there was not an inch
of his body free from blisters. He was my special job.
Every other day Smallwood appeared at the clinic,
trumpeted a tune, and offered his bulk for treatment. His
voice was a hoarse, tenor rasp and because he couldn't sing
he trumpeted with lips and tongue in remarkable simula-
tion of the real thing. When Smallwood first cut loose-
in another prison camp— Japanese guards ransacked it try-
ing to find the hidden bugle they insisted was blowing
secret signals. They remained skeptical even after Small-
wood staged a demonstration. After that he performed only
in subdued tones.
Smallwood’s working life had begun as a London grocery
boy. Then he went to sea, spent several years in Canadian
lumber camps and finally, when the war broke out, signed
on a Canadian Pacific steamship as a kitchen flunky. The
boat was bombed and burned in Singapore harbor. Fellow
sailors said Smallwood risked his life to save others in his
section of the blazing ship. Penniless and cheerful, he
worked like a horse around the jail and did the hospital
washing until monkey-pox claimed him.
While I worked on him he quivered like a dish of jelly
and alternately laughed and cried but he always insisted
that I continue until the job was done. Beginning at the
top and working down I broke every blister on his hide,
then bathed him with a mild solution of potassium per-
manganate. It took just an hour, while he trembled and
winced and the spiked points of his moustache wiggled
like the noses of twin rabbits about to sneeze. He some-
times fainted by the time I reached his feet and for that
reason I made him sit on a stool so he wouldn’t have far to
fall if he passed out.
When it was all over I would roll him a cigaret and give
him a drink of tea we brewed for dysentery patients.
Another steady customer was the New Zealander, Burt,
who developed our first colossal case of “Palembang Bot-
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tom," Burt was the case history on which we based our
subsequent treatment of that ailment and by which we
proved the efficacy of hot water, the sun and Gentian Vio-
let, in the order named.
Palembang Bottom usually started with small blisters
which developed into running sores where one sits down.
We experimented on Burt for a long time before we finally
hit the curing combination. In the beginning nothing
worked. Sulphur, salicylate, coconut oil, poultices of various
kinds and descriptions were of no avail.
'‘What am I going to do. Doc?" I asked West in despair
one morning when Burt presented his bottom for another
treatment.
“You've got to do something," Burt chimed in. “My
wife will never believe me if I tell her I got these just sit-
ting in a jail,"
Doc had an idea.
“Burt,” he said, “go sit in a bucket of hot water."
Faithfully, Burt followed instructions. Since we had only
two kinds of receptacles for holding water, five gallon kero-
sene tins and ordinary pails, neither of which had the neces-
sary staunchness or circumference, Burt’s gymnastics dunk-
ing his backside each morning were something to behold.
Audience reaction was terrific. Within a week Burt’s back-
side had improved remarkably, but it reached a certain
stage of cure and there remained. Something else was
needed.
Doc’s next idea was sunshine.
“Do your soaking early," he told Burt, “and then take a
sunbath for about fifteen minutes,"
The hospital was on the side of the jail which received
the first rays of sunlight. Every morning for several weeks
Burt stood there, posed at such an angle that when the sun
peered over the east wall the first thing it saw was Burt’s
backside. Hot water and sunshine almost but not quite
cured him.
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I can say, with pardonable professional pride, that the
final touch was my idea. In our meager medicine chest was
a tube of ointment labeled Gentian Violet. What it was
for I didn’t know but experimenting on my own skin had
shown that it was a mildly astringent indelible dye. Once
applied it had to wear off. One morning after his sunbath
I painted Burt’s bottom gentian violet. The effect was
startling especially when, due to some chemical cause un-
known to me, Burt’s bottom turned from gentian violet to
a certain shade of vermilion I had seen many times before
in the zoo at home on the bare posterior of a Hamadryas
baboon.
Needless to say, many other sufferers from Palembang
Bottom were following the experiment on Burt with an
interest approaching the breathless. No class of medical
students ever assembled with more eagerness in their lec-
ture ampitheater to watch a professor stage a demonstra-
tion than gathered each morning outside the hospital of
Palembang Jail to study the ups and downs of Burt’s case
as he progressed from bucket to sunbath to painting.
As I delicately traced gentian violet lines on Burt’s
anatomy I reflected, sadly, that probably this was the near-
est I would ever come to knowing the inner thrill an artist
feels while students follow his brush strokes. The greatest
thrill, of course, came the morning Doc pronounced Burt
cured. Cheering spectators shook Burt’s hand and the
beaming patient said, “Now I can fearlessly face my
wife.”
Second in command to Doc West in the other half of
the hospital— the dysentery ward— was Old Pop, 58-year-old
English ex-planter whom we called “The Matron.”
Matron Pop was one of the happiest men in jail, prob-
ably because for the first time in years he found himself
in charge of something and indispensable. His adult life
had been spent in Sumatra and Malaya as a planter but he
had never attained full managership of a plantation. In
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fact, he had considered himself fortunate to land a job in
the government rubber restriction office. He was a humble
man who joked about his failures and whose reminiscences
were never sour. He told my favorite Malay baby story.
First you must remember the Malay words for “Hello
Mister," which are “tabe tuan" and pronounced tah-bay
too-ahn. Got it? Hello Mister— Tabe Tuan.
Pop was walking a jungle path between plantations and
came to a flimsy suspension bridge of bamboo over a deep
stream. Pop always came to that bridge with trepidation
because its swaying and swinging required a nice sense of
balance and a firm grip on the rope handrail. This particular
morning he approached it on one side just as a Malay
woman carrying a child started across from the other. The
baby was having his morning breakfast at his mother’s
breast. To Pop’s experienced eye the child looked about
two years old, an uncommon age for breast nursing but not
infrequent in the Orient. The nursing continued as the
mother cat walked across the swinging bridge without using
the handrail because one hand steadied the baby astraddle
her hip and the other held a basket balanced on her head.
She was chewing betel nut and casually spat into the
stream.
What startled Pop was the child. In one hand the infant
held a lighted cigaret and was alternately mouthing his
mother’s breast and puffing on the nipa straw. When the
mother had crossed and the astonished Pop stepped aside
to let her step off the bridge, the child removed the cig-
aret from his mouth, exhaled a gust of smoke, looked
brightly at Pop and said,
“Tabe tuan.’’
Pop had taken charge of nursing the dysentery patients
before they arrived in Palembang Jail and he continued in
the job afterward. He slept on the floor of the clinic, or,
if he took a notion, curled up on the floor of the dysentery
ward. He could have had a door for a bed and even a mat-
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DYSENTERY AND PALEMBANG BOTTOM 47
tress when a patient died who owned one, but he preferred
only an empty rice bag.
“Less trouble,” he explained. “All I have to do is hang
it on the fence in the morning.”
The most nauseating jobs never fazed Pop. He always
ate in the ward without a stomach flutter. He reveled in
adversity and was happy to be on his bare feet, moving all
day except during the siesta hour immediately after the
midday meal. Then he slept for an hour while the dysentery
rags were being washed and boiled.
We heated water for sterilizing and hot baths on an open
fire in front of the hospital. The fireplace was a small thing
of tin, loose bricks and a grill fashioned from cell door
bars. We also used the fire to boil rice down to a thick
soup for dysentery patients. That was an uncomfortable
job because the bubbling stuff frequently popped with
little explosions which splashed scalding liquid on our bare
skin. Pve still got little brown scars on my belly which
mark soft rice blisters.
The hospital staff kept occupied during daylight hours,
nursing, dressing, cleaning, boiling, and cutting into fire-
wood the logs supplied by the Japanese. We were too busy
to mope, so time passed quickly. I had always imagined
that the worst punishment of being imprisoned would be
waiting for time to pass , . . the slow drag of hours and
days, months and years. But I was kept so busy in the hos-
pital that time never dragged. As I spiked the last rag on
the fence after the rainstorm and looked back to the first
time I had done so, it seemed that only a few weeks, instead
of six months, had passed since the shipwrecked English-
men joined us and brought dysentery.
An admonitory jangle sounded from the roll call bell,
followed by one stroke and a shouted, “Teal” Prisoners
queued up to receive their afternoon cupful each from the
big iron tong which had been simmering in the kitchen.
Cups in hand, men returned to their respective quarters.
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jquatted around the yard to enlarge the latest rumor or
formed a line at the clinic for opening of afternoon busi-
ness. When the rush of dressings had ended Doc, Allen
and I discussed what always was the biggest news of the
week. Who would be sent out next day to Charitas?
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Charitas
I N the city of Palembang were three hospitals—
New Charitas, Old Charitas and Dr. Gani's. New
Charitas had been opened by Bishop Mekkelholt
and the Dutch Sisters of Charity in 1940. When the Jap-
anese arrived they took over the new hospital and gave the
nuns five hours to return to their former building, which
had been turned into a school, and open a hospital there for
war prisoners and Dutch oil technicians forcefully trans-
ported from Java to help put the refineries outside Palem-
bang back into operation. The sisters were forbidden to take
any equipment except beds and one operating table. The
nuns, two doctors, and patients who could walk, moved the
beds and patients who couldn't walk across the street to
Old Charitas.
Native patients were ordered moved to the clinic of an
Indonesian doctor named A. K. Gani, who after the war
became a minister in the Indonesian Republic. Under
Japanese direction the clinic was expanded into a hospital
for natives with Dr. Gani in charge, assisted by Dr. Holl-
weg, who was taken from jail for that purpose along with
another fellow prisoner, a British dentist named H. Harley-
Clark. Old Charitas— known henceforth as simply Chari-
tas— for eighteen months served the civilian prisoners in
Palembang Jail and the Women’s Camp, Australian, British
and Dutch soldiers in two military camps, and the oil
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workers who were interned at Pladjoe and Soengei Gerong,
sites of the Shell and Standard refineries.
Despite vigilance of Japanese guards, who supervised the
moving from New to Old Charitas, the nuns managed to
spirit out some surgical instruments, drugs and medicines.
Half of their supplies they had already removed and hid-
den before the invaders reached the hospital.
For several months the Japanese paid no attention to our
sick prisoners unless one died; then there would be a bustle
of activity and a few critically ill persons would be taken
to Charitas. Bishop Mekkelholt became seriously ill and
was among those who thus were removed from jail to
Charitas. Due in part to his influence— when he recovered
sufficiently to negotiate— and in part to Japanese civil offi-
cials taking over administration of Palembang from the
military, there was arranged a system of weekly “exchanges”
of recuperated patients from Charitas for sick patients in
the jail, the Women’s Camp, the two military camps and
the refineries.
Charitas thus was a godsend, not only to the sick but to
the well, for the “exchanges” enabled it to function as a
clearing house of information between the otherwise com-
pletely isolated prisoner groups. Men and women returning
from Charitas brought smuggled letters from husbands and
wives and relayed news of the war picked up by radios
hidden in Charitas, one military camp and the oil camp.
Charitas served as a money exchange depot, cash traveling
both ways, depending on whether husband or wife was
carrying the family purse when they were separated. We
also got medicine and bandages from Charitas via the
smuggling route.
Two Japanese doctors alternated in visiting the jail to
inspect patients destined for Charitas. One allowed only
critically ill men to be sent. The other let any one go whom
Doc West recommended. When the lenient doctor was on
dutv. West usually included among the legitimately sick
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someone who had a wife or child in Charitas. West’s
choices were never questioned by the lenient doctor, a
friendly man who spoke English. Occasionally he would
visit our clinic and talk about medical matters. On one
such visit he announced he was returning soon to Tokyo.
I asked him if he knew the Japanese government spokes-
man, Tomokazu Hori, whom I had known in both Shang-
hai and Tokyo. It chanced that he did,
“Will you give him a message for me?” I asked.
The doctor nodded assent. I handed him a note, pre-
viously written for such an opportunity, asking Hori to
notify the Red Cross that I was interned in Palembang,
Sumatra. Whether or not Hori received it I never learned.
If he did, the message was never relayed to the Interna-
tional Red Cross.
Meanwhile I had other irons in the fire. Before Dr. Holl-
weg was taken to the Indonesian hospital he told me he
had Chinese friends in Palembang who he thought would
help me escape. The problem was not so much escaping
from jail as hiding afterward and getting aboard one of the
native sailboats which, I learned, were being allowed to
operate in inter-island trade. Such boats had arrived at
Palembang from Makassar, 1,000 miles eastward in the
Celebes. I had visions of thus reaching the Celebes and
then New Guinea and Allied-held Port Moresby. The radio
frequently mentioned Port Moresby.
Hollweg was allowed to move at will in Palembang and
was a frequent caller at Charitas. I determined to go there.
Doc West sent me as a sick patient . . . not to escape,
for escaping from Charitas would be disastrous to the hos-
pital, but to make a contact with Chinese and to get some
news. News was nearly as important to jail morale as food
and for two months we had been starved for news. Return-
ing patients said the secret Charitas radio had been dis-
mantled because Japanese were suspicious. That was not
surprising because many prisoners were so indiscreet they
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would shout for joy when they heard good news and moan
loudly if it was bad. However, I had a hunch Bishop Mek-
kelholt was only playing safe and had not dismantled the
radio.
Eight of us, including two stretcher cases, arrived at the
stone-flagged entrance of Charitas and were searched by
Japanese guards who went through our pockets and looked
inside our shirts but did not strip us. During the search
I noticed a tall, slender nun standing just inside the en-
trance, watching. One of the patients, a Hollander who
had been there before, was carrying letters inside his shirt.
He stood so he would be the last man searched. A guard
had just gone through his pockets and was about to look
in his shirt when the patient, feigning sudden weakness,
moaned and staggered back against the wall. Quick as a
flash, the nun emerged from the door and seized him by the
shoulders as though to prevent him from falling. Behind
her came another nun. Supporting him between them the
two nuns half carried the pretender past the guards into
the hospital. The frustrated searcher followed to finish his
job but the nuns brushed him off by saying their patient
was “very sick.”
That was my first sample of the stratagems of Charitas.
The nun who had first appeared was Mother Alacoque,
hospital superintendent. She was a slender, middle-aged
woman with disarming brown eyes and a shy, nervous man-
ner. Beneath that deceptive exterior, however, was inflexible
courage and purpose. She completely fooled the Japanese—
until someone betrayed her.
She knew the idiosyncrasies of every guard— who was
tough and who was not. If a tough one was on duty no
smuggling attempts were made by patients leaving the hos-
pital. But Mother Alacoque or another nun would be busy
at the front steps as outgoing patients, having been searched,
walked to the waiting truck. If the moment was judged
opportune the nuns would “accidentally” bump into a man
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53
and slip him some small object. When “good” guards were
on duty they would allow patients to leave without being
searched. In those and other ways we got limited amounts
of medical supplies into the jail. The nuns were not direct
parties to letter smuggling. They simply assisted patients
in and out of hospital and looked the other way when
necessary.
Charitas hospital was a rambling, one-story structure
divided into three parts, one for male civilians, the second
for military personnel, and the third for women. Communi-
cations between the groups were forbidden by the Jap-
anese, who were constantly patrolling inside and outside,
but Mother Alacoque arranged evasions of the rules when
good reasons arose to evade them. Whenever a wife ar-
rived in Charitas, word was sent to the jail and her hus-
band would be in the next batch of patients if Doc West
could arrange it. She even had an ally in one of the Jap-
anese guard commanders who revealed to her he was a
Catholic. When he was on duty, the hospital garden was
never patrolled during certain hours and there husbands
and wives could meet. A husband once arrived at the hos-
pital just as his wife was being returned to the Women’s
Camp. Mother Alacoque told the friendly commander. He
brought the couple into the guardroom and left them while
he stood at the entrance so they could visit undisturbed.
Guards were changed frequently and the friendly com-
mander’s group was replaced by Japanese field police while
I was at the hospital. They were uncouth, ugly men who
made life as disagreeable as possible for prisoners. But
Mother Alacoque and her nuns, smiling all the while, con-
tinued to fool them.
Three nuns were midwives who long before the war had
made themselves indispensable to Palembang’s native com-
munity. The Japanese had acquiesced to a petition from
natives that the nuns be allowed to continue assisting at
births in the city. They were on call day or night. When-
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ever we saw a nun bicycling out of the hospital grounds
we knew that Palembang’s population was about to be
increased.
Sister Paula, a little woman with smiling blue eyes and
a voice constantly on the verge of laughter, was one of the
midwives. Although she may have been up all night assist-
ing at a childbirth she put in the same day shift as the other
sisters, beginning at 4:30 a.m. when they rose to pray. In
the evening, after a day of scrubbing, cleaning and nursing
that should have exhausted her, she sat in the ward where
I stayed, sewing and practicing English, or cheering some
lonely Hollander who wanted to hear a woman's voice. I
never saw an idle nun or a gloomy one. Despite their toil
and their daily hazards they were the happiest persons I
met.
The hazards were both internal and external: internal in
that the law of averages eventually would trip a letter
smuggler, and external in relations with temperamental and
frequently changing Japanese officials. Sooner or later.
Mother Alacoque feared, the hospital would be closed en-
tirely. She planned, therefore, for the war's end when she
would need medical supplies to reopen her hospital.
How safeguard the supplies? The midwives took care of
that. Under the folds of their habits when they pedaled
away on a natal case would be some article to be given a
faithful native for hiding until the war ended. So well did
Mother Alacoque plan that when the day she feared finally
did come, the Japanese were astonished to find that Chari-
tas was down nearly to its last bottle of alcohol, its last
ampule of morphine and its last package of roller bandages.
Three doctors functioned at Charitas: Surgeon Peter
Tekelenburg, a rock of a man, big, steady, quiet, and re-
sourceful; Dr. Ziesel, a small, slender Indo-European with
a stout heart; and a German woman physician named
Goldberg-Curth who had fled from Hitler Germany to
Singapore.
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Tekelenburg had been a well known athlete in his youth
and a member of Holland’s national soccer team. He came
to the Indies as a young army doctor and, after a few years,
began private practice in Palembang. He once called me
into his surgery and said with a smile, “Today someone
told me they heard the Chungking radio.”
Tracing with his finger an imaginary map on the operat-
ing table he outlined the military situation in China as
broadcast by the radio. Next he sketched the Russo-German
front and the situation there.
I had a hunch who “someone” was. Bishop Mekkelholt
later confirmed it. Dr. Tekelenburg lived in a house across
the street from the hospital. There was hidden the Charitas
radio. Once a week he listened to news broadcasts and
relayed them to the Bishop whose task it was to get the
news to the jail without the source being known. This the
Bishop did whenever patients he could trust left Charitas.
The secret was never discovered by the Japanese, who fre-
quently made routine searches of Dr. Tekelenburg’s house.
Because of his brown skin Dr. Ziesel was allowed to live
away from the hospital. He used his freedom and his friends
among the Ambonese colony in Palembang to aid war
prisoners. The Ambonese were native to the island of
Amboina, in the Moluccas near New Guinea, They were
extremely loyal to the Dutch and strongly anti-Japanese.
Through them Dr. Ziesel managed to obtain many things
for prisoners, especially for the penniless British women.
Although hospital patients continually importuned him for
news, because they thought his Ambonese friends had hid-
den radios. Dr. Ziesel refused to be pumped. He was taking
grave risks already and he did not wish to increase them by
talk which could be traced to him.
He brought me copies of an English language newspaper
published in Singapore under Japanese auspices. How they
reached him in Palembang, Dr, Ziesel did not say. One of
them devoted columns to an exchange of nationals be-
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tween Japan and the United States. Japanese news dis-
patches quoted the American repatriates on their good
treatment and gave long lists of names, among them those
of correspondents from Tokyo, Shanghai and Peiping. I
knew them all. Now they were going home while I, who
had congratulated myself for having escaped, was again a
prisoner. Had I remained in Shanghai I would have been
with them. The stories traced the route of the two exchange
ships. They skirted Bangka Island, less than one hundred
miles from Palembang, and passed through the Sunda
Straits between Java and Sumatra. I daydreamed fantastic
schemes of rowing out to intercept them.
The story killed my repatriation hopes. Now there was
only one way out— escape; and my reliance on Dr. Hollweg
and his promises was rapidly weakening. I was beginning
to question his judgment and his discretion. Twice he had
visited Charitas and assured me that his Chinese friends
were willing to help and wanted to speak with me. A wall
about five feet high surrounded Charitas. Hollweg told me
to stand at a certain place along the wall so a Chinese
friend, in passing by, could loiter within talking distance.
I followed instructions but the Chinese did not appear.
The third time Dr. Hollweg visited Charitas he had no
sooner passed the guardroom than he began shouting,
'The Americans have landed in Java! The Americans
have landed in Java!”
That was in late 1942.
When he was finally shushed and pinned down as to the
source of his information it proved to be a rumor in the
Palembang market place. After that I placed no more hopes
in Dr. Hollweg.
Just before I returned to Palembang Jail both Bishop
Mekkelholt and Dr. Tekelenburg asked me to tell Dr. West
they feared serious trouble if prisoners continued to smug-
gle letters through Charitas in such volume. They asked
that the number and frequency of letters be drastically
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57
reduced. I relayed the message and Dr. West tried vainly
to halt the smuggling. He made an issue of it before our
elected “Camp Committee" but his efforts were bitterly
opposed by men who insisted on continuing to write fre-
quently to their women folk and who declared it was “brave
to fool the enemy" by smuggling as many letters as possible.
They derided warnings of possible dire results.
When the reckoning finally came it cost the lives of Doc-
tors Tekelenburg and Ziesel, sent Mother Alacoque to mili-
tary prison and closed Charitas.
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We Keep Holy the Sabbath Day
1 FTER escaping to Sumatra's west coast I was
l\ just shoving off for India in a native sailboat
M jL when a hand prodded me awake, ending my
dream of freedom.
“Okay," I whispered through the mosquito net and
watched the white blur that was Father Filing glide silently
through the clinic’s darkness. For a moment his figure was
outlined in the doorway, then it disappeared.
Sleepy eyed, I wriggled through the net, shuffled outside,
looked up at the star spangled sky and wished the dream
had finished before I was awakened. It was always thus. My
dreams of escape, real and imaginary, always evaporated
just before fulfillment. Drawing a bucket of water from the
bath tank I washed, brushed my teeth, returned to the
clinic, discarded the sarong in which I slept, pulled on
shorts and a shirt and started across the yard to Sunday
Mass, which was said early so as to be finished by daylight
and pre-roll-call activities.
White robed clerics were moving quietly from the dark-
ness of their cell block to the concrete walk outside where
Mass was celebrated. The altar was a wooden door laid
across two boxes and covered with a white linen cloth.
Behind it a red sarong hung from a barbed wire fence. A
single candle furnished light for reading the missal. The
narrow walk was bounded by a cell wall on one side and
a deep gutter on the other. TTiree Australians slept on the
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59
walk about fifteen feet from the altar. The congregation
stood or knelt within those boundaries while the Austral-
ians slumbered. As Mass ended, dawn chased away the
shadows and suddenly it was day.
As if awakened by an alarm the jail stirred to life. Men
hurried out of their cells, racing for the water tanks or space
on drying lines or the grass to sun their bedding. Sunning
was imperative to rid bedding and clothing of the night's
dampness and bedbugs. Bedbugs would scuttle for cover as
soon as they felt the sun. That was the moment to catch
and squash them between the fingers with a pop and squirt
of their pirated human blood. Crushed bedbugs filled the
jail with a repulsive scent. There was no other way of
de-bugging and even such measures meant only temporary
relief and the possibility of getting to sleep at night before
another wave swarmed from cracks and crevices. What I
hated most was having them fall off the mosquito net into
my face.
The welcome shout of “coffee” sounded at half past five.
That was a Sunday morning custom when coffee was avail-
able. We queued up with cups, coconut shells or tin cans
to which handles had been soldered. Back at our cells with
the steaming brew we squatted in the sun and sipped and
smoked. The sun was still only comfortably warm. The air
carried a hint of night. We were fresh from sleep and not
yet tired. No bells had rung to remind us of our status.
This was the best hour of the day.
After roll call church-goers “dressed up” to attend serv-
ices in the Dutch Protestant, Church of England or Cath-
olic faiths. Catholics had two services on Sunday, Low
Mass before roll call and High Mass with a full choir after-
ward.
Since they had no regular minister, Dutch Protestants
alternated among themselves in conducting services. Most
frequent speakers were two oil executives who had shared
shipwreck and other adventures with me, W. H. Oosten,
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director general of Shell’s vast East Indies holdings, and
Anton H. Colijn, manager of the installations at Tarakan,
near Borneo.
Like myself, Colijn had once before been a prisoner of
the Japanese and escaped. He was a slender, wiry, highly
strung man in his late forties, well known for his explorations
and mountaineering in New Guinea. His father for many
years was Prime Minister of Holland.
Oosten was a big, heavy-set, purposeful man and a life-
long friend of Colijn’s. The three of us had first met just
before sailing from Java. After our ship was sunk we were
reunited on a Sumatra beach and, along with Colijn’s three
daughters and two other men, banded together in an effort
to escape before the Japanese found us. Our effort failed
but the friendship cemented by our common vicissitudes
was a lasting one.
Until his death. Church of England services were con-
ducted by a minister who had been in charge of a seamen’s
mission in Singapore, and afterward by a British govern-
ment officer from Malaya. Reverend A. V. Wardle, the
minister, and H. G. Hammet, the officer, read from the
Book of Common Prayer and led in the singing of
hymns.
Both Dutch and British Protestants held their services
outdoors and on rainy days skipped them. The Catholic
clergy who occupied nearly all of one cell block transformed
it into a church for High Mass on Sunday mornings after
roll call. It was a large, square room with small barred
windows high in the walls. Worshippers sat on the cement
bench which ran around three sides of the room, or on
wooden stools in the central floor space. Sermons alternated
in English and Dutch, with Fathers Elling and Bakker giv-
ing the English talks. In the beginning neither of them
could speak better than awkward English but by study and
practice they gradually attained fluency. Father Bakker and
I traded language lessons— his Malay for my English; while
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Bard Curran-Sharp, who was a Mason, tutored Father
Eliing and coached his Sunday sermons.
An English friend I will call Wembley-Smythe dropped
into the clinic after Church of England services to debate
whether he should have his finger freshly bandaged before
going on shift in the kitchen,
“I hate to have it bandaged at all,” he said, sucking on
an empty pipe, “but I suppose it is the thing to do. An
ounce of precaution and all that sort of thing, you know.”
“If you fill that pipe and light it, so we won't have to
listen to that dreadful sucking noise,” Allen told him, “we
might settle your dilemma,”
Wembley-Smythe was an Oxford man while W, Probyn
Allen had gone to Cambridge. Years afterward and half a
world away from the halls of both hoary old English uni-
versities, these alumni reflected their schools’ traditional
rivalry by continually exchanging gentlemanly badinage
with a bite in it.
The Oxford man, like many before him, had taken gov-
ernment examinations and gone into colonial service while
the Cambridge man had gone into business. From remarks
of both, I gathered those two careers were traditionally
typical of alumni from the respective universities.
“But, as is common knowledge,” Allen once sniffed, “the
Malayan civil service definitely is second rate. India gets
the top career men.”
“And the poorest business types,” retorted Wembley-
Smythe.
Allen’s Far Eastern headquarters was Calcutta where,
he said, club life was more sophisticated and business life
more British than in Malaya.
However, to Wembley-Smythe, the most empire-con-
scious Briton in jail, his position as magistrate in an obscure
corner of Malaya was infinitely more important— even
though it paid less— than Allen’s club or business life, be-
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cause it stood for that indefinable something that was
‘'forever England.”
I used to wonder what kind of magistrate was Wembley-
Smythe, who is well described by the cliche “a scholar and
a gentleman.” Although he was an exceptionally well read
man, and could converse informatively on almost any sub-
ject, he was completely inept at the practical business of
living. He could do nothing with his hands, nor think of
any idea whereby he might make even tobacco money. He
was a willing, earnest, hard worker but bungled every job
so badly his friends were always trying to find easier things
for him to do. Hollanders liked him so much he was for a
long time the only non-Dutchman on the regular kitchen
staff but he was both their joy and despair.
"Believe it or not,” Chief Cook Beissel sighed one day,
"I think he even burns the water.”
And he was always hurting himself. Hardly a day passed
that Wembley-Smythe did not come in for first aid, al-
though he dreaded the clinic as a small boy dreads the
dentist’s chair. Working on him was, I imagined, like doc-
toring a skittish horse. He shied away when I reached for
the iodine, or scissors, or even an ointment swab. We
might be standing in the center of the room but when we
finished I would have pursued him into a corner.
As he sucked on his pipe this Sunday morning after
church and debated whether to have his finger redressed
now or later, he complained of a headache.
"If you had an aspirin for this beastly headache,” he
said, "I would settle for that. And it would be much more
convenient all around than fixing my finger.”
I suggested that since we had no aspirin he might be
interested in a headache remedy I learned in Japan.
"Another fellow and I shared a cottage in Kamakura,”
I began, and got no further.
"Did you really live in Kamakura?” interrupted Wem-
bley-Smythe.
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“Yes, right on the beach. Have you been there?"
“No, but I read a bit of a poem about it once that en-
dears Kamakura to me and Tve seen pictures of the gieat
bronze Buddha that sits in a tree-shaded glade near the sea.
I suppose you visited it often."
“Yes, often,” I said. “Do you remember the poem?"
He recited Kipling’s lines, of which I remember two:
Be gentle when the ‘^heathen” pray
To Buddha at Kamakural
That set us to discussing religion. Wembley-Smythe at-
tended Anglican services every Sunday but he apparently
had no very deep personal convictions about his faith.
“Religion is all right for the masses,” said Wembley-
Smythe, echoing trite and familiar words, “but I think an
educated man grows away from the need of it. The masses
do need it, however, or there’s no telling what they’ll do."
Allen interrupted him.
“Caught you in the act," he said. “You’re cribbing from
Napoleon.”
He picked up a book of quotations he had been perusing
and read aloud,
“ ‘Religion,’ says Napoleon, ‘is the vaccine of the imagi-
nation; she preserves it from all dangerous and absurd be-
liefs. . . .”’
Wembley-Smythe stopped him, saying,
“I’ll finish it from memory.
“ ‘If you take faith away from the people you will end
by producing nothing but highway robbers.’ End of Napo-
leon quotation."
“You must have been just ahead of me on the library list
for this book," Allen said.
“I agree with Napoleon that the masses need some kind
of religion,” said Wembley-Smythe, “but I’m not so sure
about my own need for it."
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'‘Did God create you differently from other people?” I
asked him.
“The question is whether or not God created me at all,”
said Wembley-Smythe. “If we all evolved from apes and
the apes from reptiles and the reptiles from fish and the
fish from amoeba and the amoeba from primordial ooze,
where does God come in?”
I asked, “Who made the ooze?”
“It all goes back to a gaseous nebulae,” said Wembley-
Smythe, “or so my science teacher said, although I suppose
he, too, was only theorizing.”
“Let’s take the nebulae, then,” I said, “will you grant it
had to begin?”
“For the sake of establishing a basis for argument,” said
Wembley-Smythe, “I’ll grant it had to begin. I’ll even grant
that some Intelligence might have begun it. But that such
a vast Intelligence should bother with creating individual
creatures is too great a miracle for my imagination to swal-
low. He started things spinning and after that let them run
their course.”
“Seems to me the kind of evolution you refer to would
be an even greater miracle and proof of God’s omnipotence
than if He created you as you are right here, on the spot.”
“How?”
“If you were a sculptor and molded a lump of clay into
the figure of a man that was so real people thought it was
alive, they would credit you with wonderful powers. But if
you took the lump of clay and threw it into the air and
said, ‘Presto! I endow this with special qualities that will
change it, in time, and of itself, into a beautiful statue,’
and it happened, wouldn’t that be a greater miracle?”
The bell summoning kitchen workers rang just then.
“Damn,” said Wembley-Smythe, “we’ll continue this
later. I’ve got to run. You haven’t fixed either my finger
or my headache. Just as well, you’d probably make them
worse.”
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He laughed and ducked out the door. I watched him
cross the yard, with his peculiar gait, shoulders stooped
but swaggering as he bobbed, rather than walked,
along.
Allen laid aside the book of quotations, yawned and
said it was about time for language class.
Language lessons, private and en masse, began in the
first days of internment. Classes were conducted in Dutch,
English, Malay, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and
Russian. Languages were only part of our scholastic curricu-
lum. Fully half of the prisoners were technicians of vari-
ous kinds. They organized the Palembang Jail Engineering
Association and held weekly symposiums on technical sub-
jects, and smaller, twice weekly classes in various branches
of engineering.
New Zealander Burt was the most dogged student in
jail. He put in five hours a day for a year on Spanish and
when he had reached a certain stage of proficiency reduced
the Spanish studies to one hour daily and took up lessons
on a jail-made guitar, strumming four hours a day for
another year. He did it all to surprise his wife, explaining,
“She won’t believe it’s me when I walk in singing Span-
ish and strumming a guitar.”
“How about organizing a poker game?” I suggested to
Eric, my fellow American, one Sunday night when restless-
ness was making my nerves crawl.
“Good idea,” he said, “but I couldn’t last long with my
present capital.”
“How much have you?”
“Eight cents.”
“We’ll play for mills and use beans for chips. Ten beans
to a cent.”
The jail’s lone Ganadian, a young fellow from Vancouver
named Ghristie, enthusiastically seconded the idea but
added a restriction.
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‘'Three bean raise limit and not more than two raises.
Tve got only six cents.”
Planter-bard Curran-Sharp signified his eagerness to par-
ticipate by quoting from Shakespeare and stipulating that
some one else had to furnish the beans.
Bill Attenborough, a Eurasian sailor from Singapore, be-
came the banker by supplying the beans.
The game proved such an antidote to jail nerves that it
grew into a Sunday night custom, with shrewd Curran-
Sharp usually quitting a little ahead and Christie a little
behind. Eric, Attenborough and I fluctuated violently in
our wins and losses. We played as though the beans were
dollar chips and the night I made my biggest killing— 36.6
cents, and the other night I took my worst loss— 17.8 cents,
were just as notable as if that many dollars had been in-
volved.
Occasionally we ended the game early enough to join
in Sunday night singsongs in the yard. Although most of
the singers were Hollanders, the tunes which predominated
were American— from Stephen Foster to Irving Berlin.
Sometimes the song fests changed into story telling bees.
My favorites were told by two Dutch controleurs, as the
civil service officers are called who have charge of areas
which would correspond to a county in America. Each con-
troleur is the supreme authority in his district, responsible,
of course, to the Resident who would correspond to a gov-
ernor of one of our states.
Controleur De Mey told how, in the course of adminis-
tering justice, he used an old fashioned hand-crank tele-
phone as a “lie detector.” The idea was born one day when
he suffered a slight shock on cranking the phone. There-
after he laid two wires from the telephone into another
room where he questioned native malefactors.
He would have the suspect hold the wires and tell him,
“Those are truth wires. If you do not tell the truth the
wires will betray you.”
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Then he would begin questioning.
“Name?
“Amat, Tuan.”
“Age?”
“Thirty, Tuan.”
“Married?”
“Yes, Tuan.”
“Were you at home last night?”
“Yes, Tuan.”
De Mey knew Amat had not been at home, so he sig-
naled his assistant who was standing at the telephone in
the other room, then repeated the question.
“You say you were at home last night?”
“Yes, Tu . . .” Amat jumped and with a yell dropped
the wires.
“What is the matter, Amat?”
“The wires, Tuan. They bit like many ants.”
“That is how the wires talk when you do not tell the
truth. Were you at home last night?”
“No, Tuan.”
Thereafter Amat told the truth.
Controleur De Raat's story illustrated how the Malays
looked upon the primitive people of a jungle tribe known
as Kubu. They roam the jungle without habitation, living
more like animals than men. A Malay taxidermist, envisag-
ing the financial possibilities of exhibiting such a strange
creature, sought from De Raat the necessary permission,
“Long have I wished for the opportunity of mounting
an Orang-Utan,” the taxidermist wistfully explained to De
Raat, “but alas, that man of the forest [orang-utan literally
means ‘man of the forest'] lives far north of here.”
De Raat sympathized with the taxidermist's unfulfilled
desire.
“But now I have thought of an even better animal on
which to practice my art,” the taxidermist said. “With your
permission I would like to kill and stuff a Kubu.”
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Another story that amused me was told by a Shell techni-
cian named Nick Koot who joined us in 1943. It concerned
the Dutch foreman of a machine shop and how he suc-
ceeded in keeping his Javanese workmen busy while he was
absent from the shop. He had a glass eye. Whenever he
left the building he would remove the eye and place it on
a special shelf so it could “look” at the room. Then he
would tell his native workmen,
“Don’t loaf while I’m gone. I have my eye on you!”
As I returned to my clinic quarters one Sunday night
after a singsong and story telling bee I heard the sound of
music playing outside the jail. Palembang natives were hav-
ing a singsong too, in a nearby public park. An orchestra
alternated between native tunes, known as krontjon music,
in which stringed instruments predominated, and Ameri-
can popular airs in which piano, saxophone, drum and
cymbal were loudest.
Despite Japan’s New Order in East Asia, Sumatra natives
still preferred American jazz when they gathered to sing
and play on nights when there was a full moon. The orches-
tra whammed away at “The Sheik of Araby,” “Roll Out
the Barrel” and “Hold That Tiger.” Then it switched to
one song that was compulsory at all gatherings and had
been ever since the sons of Nippon arrived. The song was
the wild, lilting sea chanty, Tai Hei Yo— O Great Pacific—
which I had heard morning, noon and night from the first
day I set foot in Japan to the day I left. It is one of the
few truly Japanese songs with a western style, and is mar-
tial, stirring music in any language. Dorothy G. Wayman
of the Boston Globe, whose Japanese is so fluent she can
even compose Japanese poetry, once told me that the popu-
larity of Tai Hei Yo convinced her— in 1939— there was
going to be war in the Pacific. Every foreigner from 1937
onward in Japan heard Tai Hei Yo several times a day but
few bothered to learn the words and fewer still to ponder
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their significance. Here they are as translated by Dorothy
Wayman into a ballad form westerners can understand.
O Great Pacific
I
Come all you seamen and hark to my lay.
The sea is our pathway, our faring forth gay.
Chorus: O great Pacificl Gather us in.
Friends, strangers, all brothers in kin;
One world turned to peace let us win.
II
Now rings out the call for enthronement on high
Of our glorious homeland, ordained from the sky.
Chorus: O great Pacificl Your bidding is clear.
We shall, on our voyage, still tireless steer
Till the globe has been bound in one rope
centered here.
III
Chrysthemum crest on our warships shall show
Who can rule the blue furrows of sea here below.
Chorus: O great Pacific! Shine, Rising Sun!
Let thy crimson illumine the lands we have
won
To hold for our country years thousand and
one.
IV
Long ages ago, our ancestors dear
From ocean a foothold carved out for us here.
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Chorus: O great Pacificl Your treasure of space
Spread out anew for the heroic race
West-reaching for bounds to be added apace.
V
Tide favors us now— for the bold and the brave!
Sing praise to our life-blood, the ocean’s blue wave.
Chorus: O gredf Pacific! We come, we come!
Fearless and dauntless, the sons of your
foam;
Ready to die for the sake of our home.
O Great Pacific ended on one of those peculiarly Ori-
ental dissonances which to a westerner seem merely a pause
in the music. He waits for the next note but there is none.
That is the end. I never got used to it and was irritated
anew every time it happened. As Tai Hei Yo died dis-
cordantly I damned it again, and then almost immediately
was mollified when the orchestra suddenly began playing
my favorite of all Japanese tunes, Ai Koku Koshin Kyoku—
the Air Corps Patriotic March. It is a stirring, zestful, foot-
lifting melody strangely combining the oomph of a Sousa
march with the sigh of a bleeding heart. (I never heard the
word Kamikaze until after the war, but the Air Corps
March well expresses the sentiments that must have moti-
vated those suicidal pilots.)
As Dorothy Wayman translates the march its words paint
the picture an aviator would see taking off just before
dawn and reaching an altitude where the sun comes over
the horizon to blaze a path of light over grey waves and tip
with rose and gold the wraiths of cloud above the dead
volcanic cone of Mt. Fuji. It suggests to the aviator how
brief is a human life compared with the centuries of
ancient Nippon. Ardently he desires that his short life
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might burn for one glorious, dedicated instant, dyed with
his lifeblood but adding a touch of beauty to his country's
future— just as the crimson-hued cloud adds to Mt. Fuji's
beauty.
O Great Pacific and the Air Corps March were the songs
to which Japan's soldier millions sailed and flew and
marched to war— first in China and then down the Pacific —
all the way down, over the Philippines, Malaya, the Indies,
to the Coral Sea,
Neither of these two songs is heard in Japan today, I am
told, having been banned by Occupation authorities as
unsuitable to Japan's new life.
The Air Corps March shrilled through the night, over
the jail wall and into the clinic where I sat reading. Allen
snored behind his mosquito net. The orchestra blew out
the last note of Ai Koku Koshin Kyoku, paused to catch its
breath, then swung into their other favorite, “The Sheik of
Araby." The music was not so loud it drowned the nearer
sounds of night , . . the creaking of cicadas and buzzing
of heavy, flying insects hypnotized by the light which we
could burn all night because this was the hospital clinic.
Suddenly a gecko lizard erupted into the hoarse, guttural
squawks on which Malays lay bets, wagering how many
times in succession the lizard will make his peculiar, double-
squawk which sounds something like his name— gecko,
gecko, gecko. After one initial squawk the lizard may sub-
side and wait for answer from another lizard or he may
signal any number of times up to nine. The highest I ever
counted was seven. Consequently, whenever a gecko started
squawking I listened, hoping he would make it nine.
While listening and counting I tried to locate him. He
sounded as though he was on the top outside ledge of the
window, but lizards are ventriloquists. He might be any-
where. My eyes roamed around the clinic, probing cob-
webbed corners, peering under, then over, the table whereon
lay bottles, bandages and a tin holding palm sugar. A mov-
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72
ing black line on the table caught my eye. Ants. Damn ants.
They worked nights as well as days and they always bridged
our ant traps.
Ant traps were water-filled tins in which stood whatever
the ants were not supposed to reach. A tin had to be suffi-
ciently large in circumference so that a space of water
intervened between the edge of the tin and the side of the
object inside it. The object might be a smaller tin container
or it might be a table leg. In our case all four legs of the
table stood in such traps, as did the palm sugar on top of
the table. Unless the water was changed at least every other
day a film formed on the surface permitting one particularly
agile species of ant to walk across it. This species was a
reddish-grey variety of infinitesimal size and legs of such
fragility as to be nearly invisible. Larger black ants broke
through the film. We suspected, but could not prove, that
the ants carried their own dust to cast into the water and
form the film. Once I caught a black ant ferrying across
on a straw he must have carried there especially for that
purpose. Intensely interested fellow ants were watching
his experiment.
Palm sugar was an especial delight to the ant sweet
tooth. Despite the tin’s supposed air tightness, ant proof-
ness and its location in a water-filled ant trap, I knew that
ants were swarming inside it because I had neglected to
change the water for twenty-four hours.
Ants and flies were supposed to be lizard meat, therefore
Malays believed it good luck to have a gecko in the house,
but our lizards scorned ants and only occasionally caught
flies. They were more interested in signalling to each other.
The lizard squawked again.
Gecko, gecko, gecko, gecko, gecko, gecko, gecko . . .
seven times. Would he make it eight?
“Make it eight,” I said aloud. “Make it eight.”
The lizard did not answer.
“Nuts to you,” I said, and went outside foe water to
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replenish the traps. Returning, I poured fresh water into
the tins, breaking the stagnant film and throwing ant ranks
into confusion. Signals flashed up and down the table leg,
starting a wild retreat. Those above the trap were cut off.
Members of the first rush already were struggling in the
water. Wiser heads behind were searching for another route
of escape. I chortled fiendishly and crawled into my mos-
quito net. But my chortle was without real satisfaction.
By morning they would have another bridge operating, or
at least a ferry, and our sugar would be disappearing like
snow in the June sun.
Ants, I reflected, were like Japanese. They got into all
kinds of mixups and stumbled around making a big fuss
among themselves as to procedure but their persistence
usually won. As Correspondent Percy Whiteing once told
me while we sat in the lobby of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel;
“The Japanese are like a bunch of ants trying to get a
dead fly into their hole. You watch them milling around
the fly, pulling in opposite directions, working at cross pur-
poses, seemingly without any coordination or plan of action,
and you go away contemptuous of the foolish things. But
when you return in a little while you are just in time to see
the fly disappearing down the hole. How did they do it?
Damned if you know."
I thought how right Whiteing's simile had been. For-
eigners often laughed, or fumed, at the seemingly incredible
stupidities and inefficiencies of the Japanese; at their endless
bureaucratic rivalries and quarrels. The army jibed at the
navy and the navy at the army and both at the govern-
ment. Like scorpions, government bureaus stung them-
selves with their own tails. Definite answers on anything
usually were impossible to obtain. Yet their trains ran on
time, their merchant ships maintained clock-like schedules
and now their armies had swept over eastern Asia like a
storm. In time we would win it all back. We would give
them an awful pasting; smash their cities, seize their con-
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quered tenitories and every mandated island and write the
peace in Tokyo.
We would squash them so thoroughly they could never
rise again. But they would. Already they had won a victory
we could never efface. They had demonstrated how the
yellow man could fight the white man and win— if he had
the will and the tools. Even when our armies returned, as
they would, and beat them to a bloody pulp it would not
prove— from a military standpoint and aside from the
moral issue— that the Japanese had been wrong in trying.
It would only demonstrate we won because we had more
and bigger guns.
Perhaps a few hundred years from now, I thought, his-
torians may record how the Japanese and Chinese and
other Orientals swallowed what remained of the white race
because of the incredible stupidities of Occidentals— who
could not live with themselves because of the different
colors of their politics, nor with Asiatics because of the
different colors of their skins.
What was it I had learned as a kid in Sunday school?
The words echoed in memory: “God made man in His
own image and likeness.”
How we are violating the image!
Why can't we look beyond the color of politics and
skins to the souls He created, too, and see there our fellow
men? But that is neither scientific nor economic and this
is the white man's age of Science and Economics, of mathe-
matical gods and controlled populations.
The Asiatics will continue multiplying, because they are
not among those blessed with our birth control civilization,
while we grow old and barren because children are not
economic. Asia's peoples then will not have to have bigger
and better guns because no matter how large or terrible
our weapons they will do us little good. The “uneducated”
millions of the Orient, who suffered little children to come
unto them, will only have to pluck us as though we were
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75
a withered branch and drag us away, as the ants dragged
the dead fly. They may not even have to pluck and drag
us— only fill the vacuum created by our self-induced demise.
I stirred in the mosquito net as the Air Corps March
sounded again, ending the concert. The saxophone was
tooteling hot notes, cymbals were crashing, strings were
zinging high, wild harmonies. The song was being played
as though the players liked it.
I felt certain of one thing as I dozed off. The players
did like it and they would not forget it, even after the
Indies had been retaken and the Japanese had gone.
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H erculean splashing at the bath tank and
stentorian “good mornings” by the splashers
awakened me and everybody else in the jail
hospital one morning before dawn. The Twins were at it
again.
The Twins were a pair of middle-aged Hollanders whose
affinity was not blood relationship but something even
more binding — a mutual determination to live their own
lives in their own way regardless of their companions. One
such way was pre-dawn bathing. It gave them first crack
at the contents of the small water tank.
I lay boiling inside and wondering who would be the
first to raise a protesting but futile voice; futile, for it
would only start an argument and awaken still more
sleepers. We had pleaded before with The Twins but they
insisted on their “rights.” Mutterings from Allen’s corner
told me he was fuming too. One small hope brought me a
little comfort. Inevitably, some day The Twins would be
clinic patients and I could burn their bottoms in a hot
bath. But even that dream was spoiled by another thought
as I speculated on medical ethics. Theoretically, a doctor
was bound to treat his worst enemy to the best of his ability
if the enemy should become a patient. I supposed the same
code applied to all workers with the sick, even a non-pro-
fessional volunteer like myself. Well, that killed any hopes
for even indirect revenge on The Twins.
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Daylight interrupted my speculations because daylight
meant it was my turn to light the hospital fire and start
boiling breakfast rice for dysentery patients. Morosely I
arose and went out into the damp, chill air to struggle with
the fire. The wood was both green and wet from night rain.
It smoldered and smoked but would flame only spo-
radically when I created a draft by alternately fanning up
a breeze and blowing myself dizzy as ashes swirled into my
face and eyes.
The rice should have been cooked by roll call but when
the bell rang I had just got the fire burning well. During
the long wait for counting, the flames died and afterward
I had to start fanning and blowing again. We supplied soft
rice porridge not only to dysentery victims but to half a
dozen non-hospitalized dyspeptics whose ulcers made them
eligible. The dyspeptics were congenitally sour individuals
whose dispositions matched their stomach linings. While I
sweated over soft rice, flinching occasionally as little bubbles
on its glutinous surface exploded and splashed blisteringly
onto my bare belly, they stood around holding empty,
accusing plates. One of them, he who had asked me for
milk my first morning in jail, occasionally uttered a long,
martyrous sigh.
At long last the porridge was cooked and served. Now
to make myself a cup of cocoa and relax for a little while
before the clinic rush began. Last night a fellow had traded
me enough powder to make one cup of cocoa for enough
tobacco to make two cigarets. He had brought a tin of
cocoa powder into jail with him and now, after all these
months, was using it to obtain tobacco. On the edge of
the fire I had heated a small tin of water. I poured into it
the precious cocoa powder, let it bubble momentarily, then
retired to the clinic with my drink.
I had taken the first sip when in limped the martyrous
dyspeptic. Among ourselves we called him Evangeline be-
cause he always had a long tale of woe.
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‘Tou must have swallowed your soft rice in one gulp/'
I said.
“I just couldn’t eat it,” he replied, “until the pain is
relieved in this foot of mine.”
“Clinic isn’t open yet,” I told him.
“I know,” he said, “but my foot pains so excruciatingly
I just couldn’t wait.”
“Can’t you wait until I drink this cocoa?”
“I thought I smelled cocoa. Where did you get it?”
“From To jo by special courier.”
“Cocoa would be a great relief to my ulcer,” he whined.
“Scram,” I said.
“Look at that red line,” he said, pointing to a spot just
above his ankle. “Blood poisoning. I tell you I’m suffer-
ing.”
A thin red line was there all right, extending about six
inches up from his bandaged foot. Lymphangitis. But not
an emergency. Five minutes while I drank my cocoa
wouldn’t make the slightest difference to it.
Had it been any one else but Evangeline I wouldn’t have
minded so much going to work immediately on his foot,
but the combination of that whiner and my cocoa going
cold, both climaxing the long battle with a stubborn fire
and blistering soft rice, irritated me.
“Sit down,” I said, “and wait until I drink this cocoa.”
He sat down with a self-pitying moan. I took another
drink. He whined again,
“I wish I could find cocoa somewhere.”
“Oh, hell,” I said, “you win. Shut up and take that
bandage off your foot.”
I walked out to the fire and looked at the five gallon
kerosene tin of water being heated for baths. It was warm
enough. I filled a tin and called Evangeline. By the time I
had finished treating him the cocoa was cold. I set it back
on the fire.
At that moment Evangeline hobbled over, pulled a
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smoldering stick from the fire to light his cigaret and
knocked over my cup of cocoa, spilling every drop.
There was a stunned silence while I mastered a blind
urge to shove Evangeline into the fire and curse him as he
burned; then I turned and stalked back into the clinic.
Chief Cook Beissel, who had just come from the kitchen,
followed me in to ask if a certain camp member, notorious
for his wheedling, had been in the clinic to complain of
earache.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Just as I suspected,” said Beissel. “Next time he comes
around I'll give him a real earache.”
The scrounger had called at the kitchen on three suc-
cessive nights and asked for hot water on the plea he
needed it for a persistent earache. Beissel gave it to him
but the third time he followed the man to his cell and
caught him pouring the hot water on coffee grounds.
. “Oh,” explained the scrounger, “I don't put the water
on my ear; I make coffee and it puts me to sleep so I don’t
feel the pain.”
For men like the scrounger with their spurious aches,
and hypochondriacs with their daily sob stories. Doc West
and J. Drysdale, the hospital “chemist,” had manufactured
special sleeping powders and stomach pills. The powder
was rice flour and the tablets were hardened rice paste-
nothing else, but their psychological effect was wonderful.
Perhaps the inventive Drysdale could figure out some-
thing to silence The Twins at their early bathing.
“You bet I will,” he told me when he came into the
clinic a few minutes later. “Do they do it every morning?”
“Nearly every morning.”
“Let me sleep in here tonight and if they wake me up
tomorrow morning I’ll go out and sock the blighters silly.”
Doc West vetoed the offer.
“Direct Action” Drysdale we called the Scot, who had
been a business executive in Malaya. In addition to mixing
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our genuine ointments and spurious powders he performed
another invaluable camp service— manufacturing toothpaste
which the hospital sold at cost. Drysdale's toothpaste for-
mula was his secret, arrived at after long and tedious experi-
ments with burned and ground bones, lime extracted from
scrapings off whitewashed jail walls, a clay he dug up in
the graveyard one day while helping bury a man, and vari-
ous flavors ranging from a mosquito repellent known as
white wood oil to the juice of small green limes. Whatever
his exact formula, it was a triumph of ingenuity. And it
worked. The cost came in buying the flavoring ingredients
through a Chinese food contractor who brought our daily
rations. As a profitable sideline to his toothpaste trade,
Drysdale made toothbrushes from coconut and rope fibers.
Clinic hours were from 8 to lo a.m. Doc had left and I
was cleaning my instruments and tidying up about 10:15
when in walked a customer who, instead of waiting in line
like every one else, had been sitting across the yard read-
ing a book. Now he wanted service.
“Too late,” I told him.
“I was busy and didn't notice the time.”
“Nuts, I've been watching you over there reading a
book.”
Being tripped up annoyed him. He snapped,
“The clinic is here for service, isn't it?”
“During regular hours, yes,” I said. “After regular hours,
for emergency only.”
Just then Jan Rombeek, a big Dutch sailor who worked
in the kitchen, came in to have a foot dressing changed.
We treated kitchen staffers whenever they could get away
from their work. I swabbed and rebandaged the foot and
Rombeek left. When I looked up the other man was still
there. Only now he had removed his shorts and was wait-
ing confidently for “Palembang Bottom” treatment.
The morning was nearly done. I had items to gather for
the jail weekly newspaper, “Camp News,” and this man
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who would not inconvenience himself to take his turn in
line was insisting on special service.
‘‘Okay/’ I said, “bend over.”
He bent over with a smirk that said, “I knew you would
treat me.”
I turned him around so his bare, spot-covered posterior
was to the door.
“Now take a deep breath,” I said.
“Why?” he asked. “What’s breathing got to do with it?”
“Do as you’re told,” I snarled, “or I’ll ram these scissors
into you.”
He inhaled.
“Now, hold it until I tell you to let it out.”
He held it.
I tiptoed out of the clinic and began my weekly round
of news gathering.
As the result of a three-way tie which ended a voting
contest to select a name for the publication. Camp News
had two subtitles: Hot & Less Hot News, and Terompak
Echo. “Hot & Less Hot” derived from a peppery sauce,
called sambal, served daily with rice. The sambal came in
two strengths, “hot” for old Indies hands whose taste buds
had long since been corroded by fiery peppers, and “less
hot” for neophytes such as I. Hot sambal was so hot it
made a man’s eyes water, his nose run, and caused fits of
sneezing; nevertheless, devotees relished it.
“Terompak Echo” derived from the clatter of our wooden
sandals on concrete floors. Terompak was the Malay name
for the sandals which we carved ourselves from firewood.
Terompak making was a major jail industry and the clatter
of terompaks day and night was a noise as familiar as our
own voices.
Our artist with the jaw-breaking name, Th. J. A. Ronkes-
Agerbeek, solved the three-way-tie dilemma with a cover
design incorporating all three ideas. The same cardboard
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covers were used for each weekly issue, of which four copies
were made, two in English and two in Dutch, and passed
around from cell to cell.
Despite the contest and resultant cover, the newspaper
continued to be known simply as '‘Camp News.” We used
the word “camp” because, although we lived in a jail, we
called our community a camp. Camp members were called
internees. The reasons were technical as well as psychologi-
cal: technically, we were not in jail but in an internment
camp for civilians; psychologically, “internee” sounded less
harsh than “prisoner.” And, finally, the Japanese explicitly
told us more than once that we were in an internment
camp and not a jail.
First call on my news gathering round was at the kitchen
to get from Beissel the weekly figure on Japanese-issued,
as distinct from Camp-purchased, rations.
In return for judicious bribes the Japanese permitted the
Chinese contractor who brought our regular rations to bring
extra rations also, which we paid for out of a common
fund. Every man in jail was assessed for the fund whether
or not he had money. This seeming magic was possible
because a number of Hollanders had entered jail carrying
extraordinarily large sums of money. The Resident of
Palembang, an official corresponding to a Governor in the
United States, in the name of the Dutch government bor-
rowed from those men and loaned to penniless men who
signed promissory notes payable, without interest, after the
war.
British capital was small compared with Dutch and most
of it was in Straits Dollars or Pounds Sterling, which gave
both Dutch and British money lenders opportunity to ex-
change at exorbitant rates for their own profit. Eventually,
due to the continued petitions from us, the Japanese
stepped in and exchanged the money on a dollar-for-guilder
basis, using Japanese invasion currency. Some money lenders
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were kind enough to make refunds to those for whom they
had exchanged money at a high rate but others were not,
using the emergency to fatten their pocketbooks.
Sporadically, but only half heartedly, we debated the
pros and cons of the Resident confiscating all monies from
every prisoner and thus creating a common pool that would
accomplish two things: First, we could budget with cer-
tainty, knowing the exact limits of our financial resources.
Second, it would conserve every penny by depriving wealthy
men of spending money and thus eliminate the thriving
black market. But the psychology of private enterprise was
so deeply ingrained in us that such debates never pro-
gressed beyond the talking stage. Not even the absolutely
penniless men were in unanimity on such a plan; for many
already were able to make money in jail and they did not
wish to surrender even tiny earnings over and above the
common assessment.
Money was earned by various kinds of trading or manu-
facturing. I never failed to be astonished anew at the
variety of tools disclosed on a walk through jail. Some were
homemade, some were not. There were saws, hammers,
hatchets, files, heavy chopping knives called parangs, pliers,
screw drivers, and one man even had made a plane, carving
it from a wooden block and fitting it with a metal cutter
filed from a piece of iron. How they had acquired or made
all those things was a mystery to me who had consistently
flunked my manual training class as a boy in grammar
school. After first confiscating everything with a cutting
edge, the Japanese relaxed, evidently secure in the knowl-
edge there was no place to go even if we did carve our way
out.
Beds, chairs and stools were the most common manu-
factures. Empty rice sacks became ‘‘upholstery" while fire-
wood properly tooled or cell door bars heated and bent to
correct shape supplied the frames.
Trading of all kinds flourished, from simple barter to
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complicated black market deals involving bribed guards.
Black marketing really boomed when, under guard, work-
ing parties marched every day from the jail to a site on the
outskirts of Palembang to build a camp of wooden bar-
racks with palm-thatch roofs. Some day we would occupy
the camp. Places on the working party were eagerly sought
for three reasons: the guards allowed us to buy from
peddlers at the site, and we could salvage precious small
pieces of lumber; enroute, we passed within hailing distance
of the Women's Camp and men could wave at figures they
knew included their wives; we could breathe free air outside
jail walls.
For a time in Palembang Jail it was possible for wealthy
men, at a black market kitchen built behind the jail
kitchen, to eat steak, chicken and duck while ordinary men
lived on regular rations of rice and vegetables. Wiser men
with money conserved their cash or converted it into barter-
able goods against the day when goods would count more
than money. Or, through the Chinese contractor, they
bought mosquito nets, mattresses, khaki clothing and tinned
goods such as powdered milk and corned beef.
Less wealthy individuals obtained mosquito nets by club-
bing together and buying one net which they cut into
pieces. The pieces were fitted over small frames into which
a man could put his head at night for sleeping. The rest
of his body depended for protection on clothing, rice sack
or blanket.
The Chinese contractor was an enterprising salesman
who started in business with a pushcart and soon had a
truck powered by Japanese-supplied gasoline. So successful
was the arrangement to all concerned, including the Jap-
anese, that we were able to set up a camp store, called a
toko, selling at cost to internees. Because supply never
equalled demand, a ration system was worked out whereby
each block of cells got its quota of any incoming goods.
Another source of income to poor men was corvee, the
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name we used for compulsory performance of necessary
camp labor. Every able-bodied man had to take his turn on
the various working parties— kitchen, sanitary, wood-chop-
ping. A wealthy man could hire some one to take his place.
Often such hiring was done, not because the hirer wanted
to avoid working but to help a penniless man earn money.
All these activities required organization and we had one,
headed by Dutch Controleur D. J. A. van der Vliet, who
assumed command in the very beginning and did a splendid
pioneering job. We worked out a system whereby elections
were held every six months to determine leaders of the
British and Dutch communities, members of the “Camp
Committee,” and the liaison man between the camp and
Japanese.
Routine and humdrum as was our community life there
was enough activity within it to furnish items for Camp
News. Therefore, my weekly round always yielded some-
thing.
After obtaining the week's ration figures from Beissel
I called on my next information source, Harold Lawson,
the jail librarian, to learn how many books had been
received during the week. Lawson, who had been a type-
writer salesman in Singapore, had conceived and carried
out the idea of buying books through the Chinese con-
tractor. Japanese guards acquiesced. The contractor brought
books which natives had looted from Dutch homes in
Palembang when the residents were interned. Many an
internee who donated to the library fund discovered he had
paid for books stolen from his own house. Within a com-
paratively short time Lawson had built up a library of
approximately one thousand volumes, half of them in
English.
Against my better judgment I next called on Peniyce,
chairman of the British committee, and immediately be-
came involved in a heated argument over censorship. He
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insisted on the right to approve or disapprove publication
of anything concerning the British community, which at
that particular time was quarreling over retaining him in
office.
The fight was over whether or not we as a camp should
pursue an “active" or “passive" policy in our relations with
the Japanese. The “active" school, headed by Direct Action
Drysdale and Bard Curran-Sharp, favored making formal,
written demands on the Japanese that we be allowed to
send our names to the International Red Cross and that we
be given more medical facilities and better rations. The
“passive" school, headed by Penryce and having the sym-
pathy of Camp Leader Van der Vliet, opposed such action,
saying it might provoke the Japanese and cause them to
treat us still more harshly. I personally sided with the
“active" school.
After a number of fiery sessions in the British committee,
Curran-Sharp and Drysdale resigned their membership, to
which they had been elected. Curran-Sharp posted a public
notice of his reasons.
I wished to print in Camp News statements from leaders
of both sides. However, Penryce refused to speak for publi-
cation, and further told me,
“I forbid you to publish anything about this matter."
“You're wasting your breath," I replied. “It's going to be
published."
“I'll go to the Camp Committee and have the issue
suppressed."
“Go ahead. You'll only hurt your own case by losing the
support of many who now are behind you."
If things came to a showdown and the Committee sup-
ported Penryce, I knew Camp News certainly could be
suppressed, but I doubted that the Committee would risk
a showdown. Its members were firm adherents of the peace-
at-any-price philosophy. They would compromise, I thought.
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A compromise was worked out, before going to press,
whereby several letters to the editor on both sides of the
quarrel were published in the English edition but not in
the Dutch. The basic issue was temporarily settled by the
British community deposing Penryce from leadership and
the next day promptly re-electing him but with a mandate
to pursue a more vigorous policy toward the Japanese.
The whole episode sounds silly at this writing, but men
do peculiar things in confinement. In fairness to Penryce
and those who believed as he did I must say that the active
vs. passive policy was a contentious subject throughout our
imprisonment. The rightness or wrongness of either side
was never decided satisfactorily.
After my futile argument with Penryce I dropped into
the cell of New Zealand Burt to ask if he would give the
next public lecture which Camp News sponsored weekly.
Burt once had been a member of a British expedition to
the Arctic.
“I think the boys would enjoy hearing some more about
your experiences with Polar Bears,” I said.
Burt agreed they would. His previous lecture had only
scratched the surface of anecdotes about the adventure.
As we discussed it I looked around Burt's cell. Designed
originally for one native prisoner, it was a little over five
feet wide and nearly filled by the cement sleeping bench.
Three men slept on the platform and Burt slept on the floor
in the narrow space between the end of the bench and the
door. Their bedding consisted of a rice sack apiece. Be-
tween their bodies and the concrete was one woven grass
mat. There were no shelves or hooks on the bare walls, so
their eating utensils and other belongings lay beside them
on the bench or floor. The odor from an open drain a few
feet outside the door filled the cell.
“You can almost cut it with a knife, can’t you?” Burt
remarked sniffing.
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He waved a wad of papers.
“I found these in the trash can outside the guardroom/'
he said. “They're old prison records."
They looked as though they had been tom from a ledger.
The pages were ruled in vertical columns and horizontal
lines, with names of prisoners, their dates of admission and
other data filled in.
“I'm going to use the unwritten spaces to keep a diary,"
Burt said. “I just wrote a note in it to the wife telling her
it's the little things I miss most, things like shaving gear and
handkerchiefs and a comb and needle and thread.
“I told her that confinement under these circumstances
is making men irritable and we're all losing our tempers
over trifles."
A cockroach appeared from under the bench, waved
exploratory antennae and started sidling along where floor
joined wall. Burt whipped off his terompak, struck at the
cockroach but missed. The insect buzzed its undeveloped
wings and sailed across the room. Burt made another pass
and it scuttled for the dark opening under the bench.
Angered at his second miss Burt made a third vicious swing
and lost his grip on the terompak which clattered out of
sight under a bench. It must have hit a rat hiding in there
for the startled rodent popped out of the black recess,
leaped across the floor at our feet, shot out the door, cleared
the walk in another jump and disappeared into the drain.
“What do you think of that?" Burt asked. “I'll bet the
Japs had that rat wired. My wife would never believe it.
Flying cockroaches and fifth column rats."
I left Burt and continued my rounds, exchanging gossip
here and there and feeling around for the source of the
latest fantastic rumor that Americans had landed on Bali.
Phoney rumors were my pet peeves. Few things nettled
me more than hearing men solemnly proclaim as “facts"
stories that could not possibly be true. Perhaps my special
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aversion to them sprang from having, as a reporter, chased
down so many baseless rumors. Many tales bruited about
Palembang Jail were so patently false they would have
aroused only contempt in the most juvenile cub reporter.
Yet men of supposedly mature minds accepted them. I
thought they were bad for morale because they did violence
not only to men’s good sense but to their hopes.
The Bali story, I thought, was of the harmful variety. It
sounded as though it had a source common to many pre-
vious yarns which stank. I decided to trace it. I had been
backtracking and eliminating for several days when I left
Burt’s cell to resume the hunt. The finger pointed at a cer-
tain garrulous Hollander who was too coy about his source.
He was sitting on a pile of firewood near the kitchen when
I arrived to try again. We bantered the latest rumors for a
while. Finally I tried a shot in the dark.
“A fellow told me last night where you got that Bali
landing story.”
“Nonsense,” he laughed, “no one could possibly know.”
“You mean no one outside your private circle, don’t
you?”
The laugh died and he looked at me suspiciously.
“What do you mean, private circle?”
“Oh, just the other members of the seance. He said you
got it from a Ouija board!”
He started and swore. The shot in the dark had hit home.
“Who told you? We agreed . . . well, who told you?”
“He said he thought you moved the planchette yourself.”
“I did not. We didn’t use a planchette. And who was it?”
“He said you did. Where did you get it?”
“He lies. It was no planchette. We used a small pointer
suspended by a string. None of us touched the string. Who
told you?”
“No one told me. I just guessed.”
He spluttered like an emptying fizz bottle but apparently
decided to make the best of it.
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“Don’t tell any one else, will you? If you do, it will spoil
a good joke.”
He forced a laugh. “Ha, ha. A good joke, isn’t it?”
He was trying to pass off as a joke his responsibility for
starting not only the Bali landing story but others equally
spurious that had falsely buoyed hopes of gullible fellow
prisoners.
Months previously the spiritualist and a few others like
him had labeled me a defeatist for insisting the war was
going to last a long time and that we should conserve our
resources for starvation days ahead. They resented Camp
Committee efforts to curb individual spending and conserve
our resources, as well as Camp News jibes at the black
kitchen. This pseudo-spiritualist and two other men had
once constituted themselves a deputation to investigate me.
With long faces and grave voices they had asked if it were
true I had said the war would last three or four years.
“That’s correct,” I answered.
“Impossible,” they said. “We will be free within six
months.”
All this, the deputation’s call and the conversation with
the spiritualist, occurred in 1942, before the war was a year
old. In April, 1942, those men had been confident we would
be free by June. In June they were betting on August. In
August they predicted, without qualification and with
assurances of having “confidential information,” that Japan
would collapse by October 1st— 1942! Ardently as we all
longed for freedom and the war’s end, I thought there was
no excuse for such wishful prognostications.
I reminded them of the publicly announced Allied policy
of finishing the job in Europe before turning full heat on
Japan. That brought up another tender subject. They could
think of the war in Europe only in terms of a second front
on the Channel coast. North Africa and the Mediterranean
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JUST ANOTHER DAY 91
were as secondary to them as the misty interior of China. I
said that books and articles I had read on military strategy
in the Eastern Hemisphere seemed pretty well agreed that
North Africa would be a decisive field. We had to neutral-
ize Dakar to safeguard our South Atlantic supply routes;
and we had to control North Africa for the sake of Middle
East oil and Mediterranean sea lanes; only then could we
really crack down in Europe.
'And that seems to indicate, first of all, a second front
in North Africa," I said, "if you see what I mean.”
They did not and, fantastic as it may sound reading this
in 1949, my words anent North Africa convinced the
deputation that I was mentally off balance. In fact, one of
the men, a little ferret we of the hospital staff nicknamed
“Guy Fawkes,” immediately began spreading a story I was
losing my mind. When I left for Charitas without having
been previously ill, Guy Fawkes cited that as proof of my
insanity.
He told men who later told me, “Doctor West wanted
to get McDougall out of here before the Japanese learned
he was insane and did something to him.”
The nickname “Guy Fawkes” was invented by Doc
West, who said that, given a cloak and hood, the ginger-
bearded little Dutchman would be a walking cartoon of
the seventeenth century conspirator of that name notorious
in English history. Guy was a furtive man whose childhood
reading must have been loaded with spy stories. To him
life was a vast, dark PLOT in which he was a counter-
conspirator. He talked out of the side of his mouth and
often looked quickly over his shoulder to catch any Japa-
nese agent who might be spying on him.
In the beginning we had taken Guy Fawkes seriously be-
cause he was one of the senior government men. We could
smile indulgently at his eccentricities because, we thought,
he really had secret connections with the outside that en-
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abled him to obtain authentic radio news. He would appear
at the clinic regularly once a week and read news items from
sheets of paper concealed in a book.
Perhaps he did have a genuine “pipe-line” during the
first months of imprisonment for his reports certainly
sounded conservative and authentic. But if he did have, he
either lost it and reverted to other and less reliable sources
or his outside informant did, because gradually the reports
changed from what sounded like actual Allied radio an-
nouncements to stories that must have been dream world
broadcasts.
The night before I had gone to Charitas Allen said, “I’ll
lay you five to one that within twenty-four hours Guy
Fawkes will have the ‘inside story’ of why you went.”
“That’s no wager, that’s money in the bank,” I said, “but
we could bet on what the ‘inside story’ will be.”
Allen thought awhile, then decided,
“He’ll say you’ve lost your mind and Doc had to get you
out of here.”
I didn’t think Guy would go that far so I took the bet.
My return from Gharitas, of course, proved Guy's insanity
story false, and when, in late November 1942, Singapore
newspapers, relayed from the hospital, told of Allied land-
ings in North Africa, my stock as a prophet soared con-
siderably. Two of the deputation who had previously inter-
rogated me called to apologize. Guy was not with them but
later he began coming around again as if nothing had hap-
pened and resumed reading his “radio reports.”
After uncovering the Ouija board story— which I could
refer to only obliquely— I spent most of the afternoon
typing Gamp News and carefully working around two
“holes” in the manuscript to be filled with cartoons by the
staff artist, former police commissioner Ronkes-Agerbeek.
That night, as Allen and I sat discussing the latest
genuine good news, an account in an old Singapore paper
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telling of fighting in the Solomons and admitting loss of
the airfield at Guadalcanal, Guy Fawkes walked in.
“That is only a fraction of the truth,” said Guy Fawkes,
peering suspiciously under the clinic table. “The whole
truth is that Americans have captured all of the East Indies
except Java and Sumatra. Maybe they even have landed in
Java but my source has not yet been able to confirm it and
you know how careful I am about not accepting anything
until it has been confirmed.”
“Very interesting,” said Allen. “Please go on.”
Guy Fawkes tiptoed to the clinic door, looked out, tip-
toed back again and motioned us to stand close to him.
“You must keep this absolutely confidential,” he said
sotto voce.
We crossed our hearts and bent down so our ears would
be closer to the great secret about to emerge from behind
Guy's ginger beard. He hissed:
“The Americans are about to land here. Soon we will be
free.”
This was in November, 1942.
Allen and I straightened up and looked at each other,
then at Guy Fawkes.
1 decided I was sick of the little man and his aberrations.
“There's an old saying in America,” I said, “that goes,
‘No matter how thick you slice it, it's still baloney.' Does
that mean anything to you?”
I could almost see his brain cogs grinding as he frowned
and thought and finally delivered the results of his cogita-
tion.
“I suppose it is a code but I will have to think longer to
learn its meaning.”
Had anyone else replied thus I would have seen the
humor but coming from Guy Fawkes it only intensified my
aversion for the man. So for his benefit I spelled out the
meaning of ‘no matter how thick you slice it, it's still
baloney' and concluded by saying, “That's what I think of
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your confidential information that all the islands have been
captured except Java and Sumatra.”
He stalked out of the clinic.
“You’re on his black list now for sure,” Allen said. “Now
you’ll never get any more news straight from the fighting
front.”
“We hope,” I said, and began rigging my mosquito net
with intentions of retiring early.
Just then Evangeline walked into the clinic.
“My stomach is simply awful tonight,” he whined,
“haven’t you anything that will settle it?”
Evangeline’s appearance, coupled with his act in the
morning that ended in the loss of my cocoa, made a paren-
thesis around the whole irritating day starting with The
Twins and their pre-dawn splashing.
“You humor him,” I growled to Allen and walked out-
side, only to stumble over a stool someone had left in the
middle of the walk. I limped back into the clinic, surveyed
a long abrasion on my shin and reached for the bottle of
potassium permanganate solution.
“Hold it a minute,” said Evangeline, “there’s a visitor
on your neck.”
He picked a familiar inseet from my collar and held it
up to the light.
“It’s a big one,” he said, and popped the fat, red bedbug.
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Mew Year Inventory
T he Women's Camp crowned a low hill on the
outskirts of Palembang. Every day our working
party of fifty men passed within a few hundred
yards of it on the hike from jail to the camp we were build-
ing for ourselves.
In pre-war Palembang what was now the Women's Camp
had been a group of fourteen medium-sized houses com-
prising a compact little residential section of Dutch fam-
ilies. The Japanese had strung barbed wire around the hill
and turned the area into an internment camp, packing in
women and children forty to a house and ten to a garage.
Between the lower houses and the barbed wire fence was a
low retaining wall and an open space where women
gathered daily to wave and call to the working party as it
hiked past.
Once a week I laid off my hospital job and joined the
working party in order to breathe free air outside the jail
and see what I could pick up at the new camp site. Most of
the building work was done by native laborers. We did little
but go through the motions for the benefit of Japanese in-
spectors who came around infrequently. They appeared
satisfied with our pretenses. It was a period of leniency.
The working project lasted through the last half of 1942.
It began when a Japanese civil administration superseded
the military government of Palembang.
We marched to work in line, two abreast, with guards
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flanking us and bringing up the rear. Tlie guards during
this period were not Japanese soldiers but native police,
mostly Javanese, who had been members of the colonial
police force before the war and who were as friendly to us
as they dared be. They allowed us to wave and shout back
to the women. The distance was too great to distinguish
words but the women's concerted voices, high pitched and
vibrant, made cheerful sounds. Husbands and wives had
worked out methods of identifying each other by signals
with hats or colored clothes. The signals were arranged by
smuggled correspondence via the Javanese police, who also
guarded the Women’s Camp, or through the Charitas let-
ter system.
The Javanese police sometimes carried other things than
letters. One day I noticed an internee making what looked
like splints. Since no prisoners had broken bones I dis-
played my curiosity. They were splints. But for whom?
“The Women’s Camp.”
“Women’s Camp?”
“Yes. Mrs, Koenes broke her leg.”
“How?”
“She was standing on a wall, waving to the working party,
and fell off.”
I laughed and told him, “You’d better make some more
splints in case the Colijn girls fall off their roof,”
The Colijn girls, Helen, Antoinette, and Alette, daugh-
ters of the oil man, did their waving from astride the ridge
of a rooftop. Antoinette and Alette were ’teen-agers and
Helen had just moved into her twenties. They were husky
young women with strong lungs. Their piercing voices and
wild gyrations as they signaled to their father in the work-
ing party caused our Javanese guards to remark they must
be crazy.
I first met Helen when, after swimming all afternoon in
the Indian Ocean, I was pulled into a lifeboat. She was the
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97
only woman in the boat and during the ensuing thirsty six-
day voyage to Sumatra we became well acquainted. When
we landed on the isolated southern tip of Sumatra the
majority aboard elected to take the boat and sail to the
nearest Japanese occupied port to surrender and obtain
medical aid for a seriously wounded passenger. The rest of
us, including Helen and her father, hiked north along the
beach. On the third day we found another lifeboat and its
passengers. Antoinette, Alette, and Oosten, the Shell
executive, were among them.
A machine gun slug from one of the planes which sank
our ship and strafed us in the water had ripped Antoinette's
arm open to the bone from elbow to wrist. Salt was our only
antiseptic and rags torn from clothing our only bandages.
Wet dressings made from those materials kept Antoinette’s
arm from going septic. Although she must have suffered un-
mercifully during our three-week hike along the coast she
never mentioned pain. She had her father’s courage and
tenacity and despite her wound was determined to escape
with him if we could get away.
The girls were in Java when Colijn was captured in
Tarakan and dispatched as a hostage under guard to warn
authorities in another oil port, Balikpapan, not to destroy
the installations before the Japanese arrived. If they were
destroyed, said the Japanese commander, the women of
Tarakan would be shot. Colijn escaped by a clever ruse.
Balikpapan was razed by the Dutch to prevent its use after
capture and Colijn went on to Java. His wife was among the
women of Tarakan. After the war I learned the women
were not executed as the Japanese had threatened, but
Colijn had no way of knowing that when I met him fleeing
Java.
The day before Christmas I marched out with the work-
ing party. As usual we began to wave and shout when in
sight of the Women’s Camp. But the women were silent.
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standing motionless in the open space. The Colijn girls on
the roof were quiet too. Their stillness silenced us. We
slowed to a halt and asked each other, in whispers, what was
wrong.
The answer came in song. Across the no-man's land
which separated us sounded the melody of “Come All Ye
Faithful.” Our guards were as astonished as we and let us
stand there listening. The music softened on the second
song, “Silent Night, Holy Night,” and grew stronger on
the third, a Dutch carol. Leading the singers was a woman
in the habit of a nun. Her arm rose and fell, as though wav-
ing a baton.
The guards finally asked us to move on.
“Please walk,” they said in Malay. “Japanese may come.”
We walked, moving quietly and slowly in order to hear
those voices as long as possible.
That was the second time the women had risked trouble
in order to cheer their men. Months before, on the birthday
of Queen Wilhelmina, a holiday the Dutch celebrate as do
we the Fourth of July, the women astounded us by flying
two Dutch flags. As the working party passed, the flags
were raised from the Colijn girls’ rooftop perch while other
women on the ground waved colors of the House of Orange
and cheered madly. Probably that was the only time be-
tween Palembang’s capture and its liberation that Dutch
colors flew in the city.
Wilhelmina’s birthday is August 31st and on that date
in 1942 we still had been able, by bribery and good luck, to
purchase food enough to celebrate, even in a jail.
Still flush with guilders brought into internment, the
Dutch had transformed the jail yard into a midway and
staged an auction “horse race.” Horses and riders were ad-
vanced by dice throws around a white-washed track. Finan-
cial proceeds were split between the kitchen and hospital
funds. The day had begun with religious services and sing-
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ing of a Te Deum. Father Bakker’s choir gave its first offi-
cial performance in the late afternoon. Dinner was colossal;
it included meat and potatoes.
The birthdays of Princess Juliana * and her consort,
Prince Bernhard, also were observed by extra food and cof-
fee. Nor were Dutch holidays the only ones celebrated. The
birthday of England’s King George was marked by a special
meal and, although there were only two Americans in jail,
the Fourth of July was a big day too.
Festivities had begun early on that July 4, 1942, my first
Independence Day in captivity. Everstijn, manager of the
toko, had galloped into the clinic bearing two plates, one
for Eric and one for me. Each plate contained two slices
of buttered toast, a piece of canned salmon and two sardines,
carrots sliced to resemble bacon, pickles and hot chili. On a
piece of paper was written, ‘‘With compliments of the toko
staff.” Chief Cook Beissel came in a few minutes later with
two more plates, each bearing one fried duck egg and a
note, “With compliments of the kitchen staff.”
Official congratulations by the Dutch and British com-
munities were tendered by the Resident of Palembang,
Oranje; the Burgomaster of Palembang, Hildebrand; the
Camp Leader, Van der Vliet, and British Leader Penryce.
They, and many others, called to shake hands, wish us a
happy day and express hopes that “the Allies soon will be
here.”
The Pacific war was only eight months old on July 4,
1942.
The unexpected breakfast donated by the toko and
kitchen staffs was only a starter. At noon we opened a long
hoarded tin of bully beef and shared it with Father Elling,
who had brought presents of tobacco.
That night Allen was host at a gala dinner in the clinic.
The medicine stand was cleared of bottles, covered with
my bed sheets and became a banquet table. Decorations
* Wilhelmina abdicated and Princess Juliana became Queen in 1948.
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were three paper flags— Dutch, British and American— and
green hedge leaves stuck into two measuring glasses. Around
the table sat Camp Leader Van der Vliet, Oosten and
Colijn, my companions of shipwreck and jungle trek; Chief
Cook Beissel, Dr. Hollweg, Poet Curran-Sharp, Doc West,
Allen, Eric and I.
Beissel himself cooked the dinner, a sumptuous nasi
goreng— fried rice garnished with meat and condiments.
Dr. Hollweg astounded us by producing a fifth of Eng-
lish gin which he had brought into jail when first interned.
We mixed the gin with water, flavored it with limes pur-
chased through a guard, and had gin rickeys. Allen proposed
the first toast. We all stood as he raised his tin cup and
said:
“Gentlemen, I give you the President of the United
States of America, Queen Wilhelmina and King Ceorge of
England.”
We drank.
That was the first time I ever felt genuinely patriotic on
the Fourth of July.
Half a year had passed since that red letter day and here
it was the day before Christmas and another surprising
celebration. The women's Christmas serenade had been
such an emotional surprise that working party members
were silent during the rest of the hike to the new camp site.
When we arrived, we dispersed around the rectangular
field where wooden barracks and a high barbed wire fence
were rising. This area on the edge of the city long ago had
been sectioned off into streets, but only a few houses had
been built, and undergrowth covered the intervening fields.
Malay peddlers hung around the camp site and haggled
with us over prices. One peddler, by prearrangement, had
a fried chicken for Colijn. During the morning Colijn
slipped unobserved into some undergrowth on one side of
the area. Then, on hands and knees or sometimes flat on
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his belly, he snaked through the area of fields and houses be-
tween us and the Women's Camp.
He reached the Women's Camp fence at a point which
was screened from the sentry boxes by bushes. His three
daughters were waiting, also by prearrangement. Gleefully
they received the chicken and talked in excited whispers
with their father. He kissed them, through the fence, then
started the long wriggle back to our camp site. After the
war Antoinette told me the sequel.
The farewell had been witnessed by another woman who
betrayed them to the Japanese guard, hoping thereby to
gain some advantage for herself. However, they were back
in their quarters and the chicken was hidden before their
betrayer returned with the guard, who took them to the
commandant, who in turn summoned the leader of the
Dutch women in camp. She was a nun. Mother Laurentia,
a school teacher and musician. She it was who had led the
women in their Christmas caroling to us.
Mother Laurentia listened to the betrayer's accusation.
Coolly she told the woman, “You are dreaming. You never
saw a man talking to these girls."
To the guard commander she said,
“This woman is not responsible for her actions. Please
excuse her. Obviously a man could not come to our fence
without your sentries seeing him. She is suffering hallucina-
tions."
Convinced, the guard commander berated the woman
tattle-tale and dismissed the case.
“That was the third time Daddy visited us at the fence,"
Antoinette told me. “They were happy moments. We ad-
mired him so much for coming. And how it bucked us up
to have him right there."
They never saw him again. He was dead when liberation
came.
As we hiked back to jail that Christmas eve of 1942, we
discussed how best to reciprocate the women's carols. We
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were still debating when we reached the front gates and
were counted through.
Shortly after dark, prisoners gathered in the yard while
Reverend Wardle led Englishmen in singing Yuletide
hymns and songs, creating an atmosphere for listening to
Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Reading key passages and syn-
opsizing in story-telling fashion what lay between, Allen
recited the tale of Scrooge and Marlowe, the Cratchets and
Tiny Tim.
Christmas morning everyone went to church, some at-
tending services of all three faiths, starting with the Cath-
olics’ High Mass at 6:30 a.m. The clergy had spent days
disguising their Cell Block No. 3 as a church. They could
not hide the barred windows or grey walls or cement sleep-
ing benches but they softened them with greenery, flowers,
fronds, and palm leaves. The working party had brought
in the branches and shrubs; a Chinese woman brought the
flowers to the jail gates— making a dozen trips— and two
smiling Japanese guards had brought the palm leaves!
Orchids and gardenias banked the altar. It looked as solid
as one of marble, although beneath the flowers and the
freshly laundered white altar cloths were only planks. Six
candles flickered in tall, conical, painted candlesticks of
cardboard which disguised beer bottles underneath. Behind
and above the altar were murals painted by Father Bakker
on cardboard screens of the folding type used by Chinese.
The murals depicted Bethlehem’s barren hills the night
the shepherds and their flocks received angelic tidings of
the Nativity. Where he had obtained the cardboard to
make the murals and the paints to paint them was Father
Bakker’s secret.
Father Elling, the jail’s most eloquent speaker in either
Dutch or English— he had learned English that well since
the previous April— preached the sermon. It was the second
time he had given the same sermon and it was as appropri-
ate to this occasion as when he first preached it, Christmas
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Day, 1936, in Utrecht, Holland, when his parents, brothers
and sisters and all their family friends gathered in the
church to hear his first sermon as a priest.
Protestants as well as Catholics packed the cell and the
area immediately outside it. After a special Christmas morn-
ing breakfast Colijn conducted Dutch Protestant services
and Reverend Wardle preached a sermon and led prayers
for men of the Church of England. Reverend Wardle for
years had been in charge of a seamen's mission in Singa-
pore and this morning he drew on that background to ad-
dress his fellow castaways of the sea.
Christmas was a holiday from work. The Japanese had
allowed husbands and wives to exchange gifts, via a special
courier, on condition there was no writing except the re-
cipient’s name on or in the packages. So we had Christmas
presents, although not of the sort usually associated with
Christmas. They were whatever knicknacks the givers
could fashion with needle and thread, or pocket knife, or
cook from their scarce possessions. And somehow the ever-
thoughtful women had managed to get the ingredients for
toffee and paper to wrap the pieces in, and thus ensured
every man a present of candy whether or not he had rela-
tives in the Women’s Camp.
An Australian jockey named Donnelly, the smallest man
in jail, dressed up as Santa Claus and, accompanied by the
five biggest prisoners as bearers, distributed the presents. I
was flabbergasted when he marched into the clinic with a
present from the Colijn girls, a notebook cover made of
cloth and monogrammed.
Dinner that day marked the high point of food abun-
dance in our captivity. We had a fat Christmas in 1942. Per-
haps that is why I remember the first Yuletide so vividly.
It was such a contrast to subsequent ones. Also, we still
were balanced enough to appreciate life and each other and
the spirit of the day. Starvation, disease, confinement, death
and the bickerings of men had not vet distorted our per-
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spectives. We could laugh and sing and perform such non-
sense as serenading the small army of corveyers preparing
dinner. The orchestra parked itself outside the kitchen.
Clapping hands and stomping feet set a beat to which the
workers chopped meat and vegetables and peeled potatoes,
washed pots and pans and cut firewood. Chief Cook Beissel
had been hoarding for this occasion. Also, he had used his
diplomatic powers on the guards to get the necessary condi-
ments for a true nasi goreng which literally means fried rice
but actually connotes much more . . . just as the two
words turkey dinner imply more than turkey to an Ameri-
can. Beissel’s only rival for food output that day was a
Britisher named Knobby Clark who, from rice flour he
ground himself and hard candies he made from palm
sugar, steamed fifty “plum puddings” on a stove consisting
of two kerosene tins set on a few loose bricks.
That night, beneath a black velvet, cloud-flecked sky,
sprinkled here and there with stardust. Father Bakker’s
choir first sang the story of the Nativity. The kitchen porch
had been transformed into a stage by judicious use of the
church decorations: palm leaves, sarongs and the murals.
Standing in a splash of light were the singers while beyond
them in the yard’s darkness men sat, squatted or stood,
illuminated only by the glow of their cigarets. Tobacco and
nipa leaves had been issued in the morning.
Beissel and Allen read the gospel story. When their
voices ceased. Father Bakker raised his baton, swept it
downward and the sacred cantata began.
One of the most difficult of all things to secure in Palem-
bang Jail was silence for events such as lectures or shows.
Always there were some disinterested individuals who
spoiled things for others by talking, laughing or splashing.
The greatest tribute to Father Bakker’s genius was the
silence he and his choir secured. After the singing started
not even a cigaret was lighted as the music and the memo-
ries it evoked held men completely hushed until the last
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notes throbbed and a full moon rose silvery and splendid
to flood the jail yard and walls with light.
I have seldom seen an audience anywhere so moved by
song as were my fellow internees that night in Palembang
Jail. Most of them, I think, thanked God they were alive
and asked Him to let their families also know.
In the Christmas issue of Camp News was a poem writ-
ten by Allen, which I thought contained a message common
to the hearts of most prisoners. Entitled, “To My Wife at
Christmas," it said:
“It needs no festal time to bring you to my mind.
For every sunrise, every close of day, I find
Your image by me, smiling, bidding me good cheer.
Whispering our private nonsenses I love to hear.
Yet to be parted at this season, for this cause,
Seems doubly hard to bear; though if men break
the laws
Of Him on high, they only have themselves to
blame
For suffering; the Eternal Rules are still the same.
Last year I hung a stocking, child-like, by your bed
While you were sleeping; but this year my
thoughts instead
And prayers and wishes to the stars and round
moon spoken.
Are all the gifts that I can send to you for token
Of all the joy there is between us, come what may.
Have faith, my love, although the night is dark,
the day
Will break, and peace and good will come to
men at last.
God bless and keep you always."
My own thoughts were summarized in one of the few
editorials I ever put into Camp News. The editorial con-
cluded by saying:
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'‘Past Christmases were happier, we admit. But this
Christmas need not be sad or gloomy. How lucky we are
to be here, and not at the bottom of the Bangka Straits
[where many were sunk] or in the Indian Ocean, or pris-
oners in certain other concentration camps. For there are
worse. We have reasons to smile today. We are in good
health; we are not starved; we are not cold. We are not
being bombed or shelled or machine-gunned. Truly this is
a wonderful Christmas because we are not among the
maimed or dead. We are alive!"
Seldom have I appreciated Christmas more than that day
as a war prisoner in a jail beside Sumatra’s Moesi river, two
degrees south of the equator. Different as was that Christ-
mas to all of us, there was about it something which
brought us closer to the real significance of the day than
many of us had ever been. We had Christmas in our hearts,
instead of on an electrically lighted tree or in gaudily
wrapped packages from a department store.
On the day after Christmas we reciprocated the women’s
serenade. Father Bakker led his choir out as members of
the working party. When within earshot of the Women’s
Camp the choir began to sing, first a verse in Dutch then
a verse in English, “Come All Ye Faithful." The women
were waiting, standing silently in the open space between
their houses and the fence.
The choir walked as slowly as the men could move. The
guards did not hurry them, but also did not let them
halt.
“Come All Ye Faithful" was followed by “Silent Night,
Holy Night." The Women’s Camp was no longer within
sight when the song ended but the choir swung into an
other melody, for singers knew the women could hear them
still and would be listening even after the last note died.
We ushered in 1943 with a New Year’s Eve show at
which I was master of ceremonies. High spot of the show
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was intermission because a punch was served which was
spiked by liquor two men had spent weeks distilling. Coils
for their still were made from an electric wire conduit stolen
from an abandoned house adjacent to the new camp site.
The rest of the still was made of tins, bottles, and a metal
firebox. Fermented rice supplied the mash. The final
product was a foul tasting stuff but its viciousness was dis-
guised by the punch it powered.
Clad only in a pair of shorts ?! id squatting on the kitchen
stoop sipping punch during iiuermission, 1 thought of the
previous New Year's Eve, when Martin, Lee and I, wearing
all the clothes we could find, shivered in a mud farm
house and drank in 1942 with throat-searing Chinese wine
while we waited to begin the most hazardous leg of our
escape from Shanghai.
After the show, when everybody had shaken hands and
wished each other Happy New Year, and gone to bed, I
sat outside the clinic and, as men are wont when they have
little else to do at such a time, reviewed the year and
attempted a balancing of books. There were fewer items
on the credit than on the debit side of the ledger but the
black entries outweighed the red because my sense of values
had changed considerably.
What I call my own private miracle had done that. After
the ship on which I was escaping from Java was sunk in
the Indian Ocean, I had swum up to the only lifeboat in
sight. Its occupants turned me down.
‘'No more room," they said, and rowed away, leaving me
to drown.
That was shortly before noon of March 7, 1942, approxi-
mately 250 miles southwest of Java. Death was a certainty.
It was only a matter of time. Buoyed by my life belt, I
spent the afternoon swimming and praying and thinking
and weighing the values of life — balancing my own books.
Toward sundown a lifeboat mast appeared on the horizon.
I swam toward it, but the sail was hoisted and the boat
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moved away. Another lifeboat came into view. It too was
hoisting sail to go off without me.
“God/’ I prayed, “make that sail go down.”
The sail collapsed.
The sail was hoisted a second time. Again I prayed.
Again the sail collapsed. Twice!
I reached the boat and was pulled in. Crew members
refused to go after another man who had been swimming
behind me. Too many were in the boat now, they said. I
was picked up only because I reached it under my own
power. Had the sail’s collapsing not delayed the lifeboat
so I could reach it, I, too, would have been left behind.
That is why I call the episode my own private miracle.
As I sat outside the clinic of Palembang Jail in the last
minutes of 1942 and looked back, it was plain that the year
just ending had been my greatest spiritual adventure. Its
lessons had shaped a conviction that success is not measured
by how high a man has climbed or whether the whole
world knows his by-line; but by whether he has loved God
and his neighbor, not with words only but with deeds.
While swimming in the Indian Ocean and living in prison
I had found what for me was the most important thing in
life; and somewhere out of all the travail involved had
come peace of mind.
My heart could sing and did as the guardroom clock
struck two o’clock Tokyo time and it was midnight * and a
New Year in Sumatra.
• The Japanese operated on Tokyo time throughout their areas of occu-
pation no matter in what time zone. We internees kept our watches set
on Palembang time, two hours behind Tokyo.
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Barracks Camp^Harbinger of
Evil Days
W E stripped the jail like a swarm of Mormon
crickets moving through a grain field when
we left it and moved to the new Barracks
Camp January i6, 1943. The Japanese supplied trucks for
our luggage, the first time they had given us anything but
rations since our imprisonment, so we carried everything
detachable. Even bricks from the bath tank floor were hid-
den in the debris we called our baggage— sacks, bottles, tin
cans rusty and otherwise, pieces of metal and every stick
of firewood stacked outside the kitchen. We left nothing
but the walls.
The new camp covered a rectangular area 330 feet long
and half as wide. Long windowless barracks of plank and
bamboo with earthen floors and palm-thatched roofs lined
the four sides. The short spaces between buildings were
filled with solid wooden fence. A barbed wire fence sur-
rounded the whole area and high sentry boxes in each of
the four corners commanded views of the outer barricade
and the inner yard. We had twice the space for walking and
half again as much for sleeping as in Palembang Jail, and
were anticipating the comfort of more living room, but we
did not get it. More prisoners came. They arrived in a con-
voy of trucks: 126 men, two cats, four dogs, fifty-three ducks
and one hundred chickens. And the men were well fleshed.
109
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Not until we saw the newcomers did we realize how lean
we had become.
They were the Dutch oil technicians of Standard and
Shell who had been forcefully imported from Java to repair
the damaged refineries near Palembang. They had success-
fully done so little that the Japanese sent them back to
internment. However, they had been well treated, well fed
and even paid for their time. With them they brought
enough equipment to set up their own camp, complete with
kitchen and first-aid facilities.
Not until they walked in on us did they know they were
not to occupy a place by themselves. The surprise was
mutual. When we had all unpacked, and individual living
spaces been allocated, we found each man had a space six
feet six inches long and twenty-seven inches wide for him-
self and belongings on the long bamboo sleeping benches
that lined the barracks. Quarrels over who was infringing
on whose space were frequent and bitter. Some men pro-
tected their rights by erecting tiny fences of sticks and wire
on either side of their twenty-seven inch spaces. Others
were more ingenious. They clubbed together into joint
partnerships, known as kongsies, and enlarged their living
Space by various means. Those who had the necessary mate-
rials built bunks in tiers. This method allowed three men
to sleep stacked one above the other, thus using only one
bed space in the horizontal plane. The two free spaces
served for storage and a place to sit. A few rugged individu-
alists, using saws, cut their bed spaces from the bench and
then elevated them like platforms, a few inches above the
bench level. As bug life increased, those who could built
lean-tos against the fence outside and slept there.
Food supplies diminished steadily from our first day in
the new camp. As our diet deteriorated, skin sores and eye
troubles increased. Men became night blind and by day saw
double or were plagued by dancing spots. The queues of
patients waiting for skin treatment grew so long that we
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called men up by blocks in the same way as for serving food.
Hot baths were by appointment and only major cases got
them because the water supply was so poor we often had
no water at all.
Fortunately, we were able to increase our hospital space
in the new camp. In fact, the Japanese allotted one entire
barracks to the hospital and instead of bamboo sleeping
benches, gave us individual wooden beds and laid a con-
crete floor to put them on.
As hunger preoccupied us we became calorie conscious,
mentally translating every morsel of food into its com-
ponents of vitamins, proteins, calories and other nutritive
elements. The power packed by a few vitamins and fats was
strikingly demonstrated when Doc West, after months of
pleading, received a quantity of palm oil from the Japa-
nese. Sumatra abounds in palm oil but for some reason our
captors were reluctant to give it to us. Doc issued the oil,
rich in Vitamin A, as medicine to men suffering night
blindness. Their vision improved remarkably. More oil
arrived and it was given to men with certain types of skin
disease. Their sores healed.
Palm oil rations increased until, for a few months, it was
possible to issue every man in camp five cubic centimeters
—about one teaspoon— on his noonday rice. The effect was
remarkable. Itching and burning skins were relieved. We
slept better at night. Our dispositions improved and there
was generally more harmony among us. And all because of
a teaspoon of palm oil. That sounds small and is, but it was
big to us who by late 1943 were counting things in grams
and teaspoons instead of pounds or quarts. Peanuts, for
example, were issued when available not by weight but by
number. And salt, vital to our lives, was issued in ten gram
(approximately 1/3 oz.) lots.
We moved to Barracks Camp during the wet monsoon.
Rain fell steadily through January, February and March.
Tons of rain, rivers of rain. The camp had excellent drain-
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age— from one end to the other— where water piled up and
earthen floors became ponds through which men waded to
their sleeping benches. The yard was a quagmire of red,
mucilaginous mud that gripped our wooden sandals, tore
them from our feet and spilled us headlong into its gluey
embrace. Falls were most frequent as we carefully picked
our way back from the food lines, carrying a plate of rice—
a heartbreaking mishap in prison camp.
Septic tanks, already inadequate for our numbers, over-
flowed, their effluvia accentuating our discomforts and in-
creasing disease hazards. Clothing, bedding and mosquito
nets, wet from roof leaks, or clammy damp from moisture
laden air, could not be dried because there was no sun.
Through April the rains diminished and the sun peeked
out. Through May the sun shone all the time. It burned
through June, July and August, drying up the land and the
wells we dug when water from the city system failed. We
dug the wells deeper, scraped muddy water off their bottoms
and passed buckets hand to hand, chain fashion, to fill our
tanks. There was no water for washing clothes and so little
for our bodies that in time we stank nearly as badly as the
septic tanks. Vermin thrived in the noisome barracks,
swarming hungrily over us at night, biting with sharp,
needle-like nips, adding their tortures to the burning skin
itches which returned when the palm oil supply ended. The
itch was especially fierce at night. A man’s skin crawled so
much that, to keep his sanity, he deserted his bed and
walked up and down the yard.
Hunger and drouth raised special problems for chicken
and duck owners. Should they keep the fowls and sell eggs,
or kill them and sell meat? Eggs would be more profitable
in the long run but the hazards against chickens living were
numerous. A hen mistakenly wandered into the Australian
section one evening and was quickly and silently strangled,
plucked and popped into a cooking pot. Dogs, cats and
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rats also were their enemies. Fowls could not be kept in box
coops all day and when released they might lay eggs off the
family premises. Before liberating a hen to scratch in the
yard the owner probed her with his fingers to determine
whether an egg was in prospect.
One owner safeguarded his ducks by tying them to a
small tree. Heat waves were raising dust in the yard and the
panting ducks attracted the sympathy of a Japanese guard.
He left his post, approached the ducks, studied their hobbles
and went away. Presently he returned with a canteen of
water, a cup, and a handful of rice. The ducks drank from
the cup and ate from his hand.
Tempers shortened as conditions worsened. Internees
became increasingly critical of their leaders. A movement
started to unseat both Dutch and British members of the
Camp Committee. The ‘‘oil block,” which had been
strengthened by the 126 newcomers, exerted its power. Al-
though the oil men were themselves divided into Shell and
Standard rivalries they had a mutual interest in being more
strongly represented in camp government. The basic con-
flict over an “active” versus a “passive” policy toward the
Japanese furnished fuel for controversy. But what finally
brought matters to a boil had nothing to do with policy.
Dogs caused the revolt which unseated Camp Leader Van
der Vliet, British Leader Penryce and other committeemen.
The new oil men had brought four dogs with them.
Three other dogs somehow found their way into camp and
were adopted by non-oil men. Van der Vliet announced in
July that he had been ordered by Palembang City officials
to get rid of the dogs because Palembang was full of rabies.
Dog owners accused Van der Vliet of lying. They said he
himself wanted the dogs removed from camp and started
the rabies story as an excuse. Van der Vliet hotly denied
the accusations and said he was acting only under orders
from the Japanese. Proof that Van der Vliet was telling
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the truth materialized July 14th in the form of the Palem-
bang Indonesian dog catcher, complete with truck and
assistants armed with clubs. Not a dog was in sight.
“Bring dogs in five minutes or we will go in and get
them ourselves," the guard commander told unhappy Van
der Vliet.
Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen, while Van
der Vliet went through camp pleading with dog owners.
Still they refused.
“Search barracks," the guard commander ordered.
Joyfully dog catcher and guards started through the bar-
racks swinging clubs. Dog owners capitulated, produced
their pets from under benches and saw them loaded into the
truck and taken away. Then they turned on Van der Vliet
with renewed fury, claiming that if he had resisted the
initial demands the matter would have been dropped.
Van der Vliet resigned as Camp Leader. The Committee,
which had supported him, called for a vote of confidence.
The next day dog owners were summoned to the front
gate and told by an Indonesian guard they could have their
dogs back on payment of a dog license fee plus a “present."
The owners paid; the dogs were returned. But the vote of
confidence was held anyway and Van der Vliet and the
Committee lost by five ballots.
An election was set for July 21st and campaigning began.
I entered the political arena to root for Direct Action
Drysdale, who decided to be a candidate when it was nearly
too late to file because nearly all British signatures already
had been secured for the petitions of other candidates. Six-
teen signatures were required for each petition and I had
obtained only fifteen shortly before filing time. Desperately
I appealed to the sportsmanship of Wembley-Smythe.
“I don’t like him," said Wembley-Smythe, taking a deep
breath, “and I won’t vote for him and I hope he’s not
elected because he is too headstrong and brashly unorthodox
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in his methods, but I’ll concede he should be given a sport-
ing chance to run for election. I’ll sign his petition.”
Many of his fellow countrymen were genuinely afraid
that if Drysdale should become British leader he would so
antagonize the Japanese that dire consequences would fol-
low. Their fears dated from the time Drysdale dared a
Japanese guard to shoot him and the guard backed down.
For a month after their capture in February, 1942, the
Britishers had been forced to load ships in ihe Moesi river.
The labor was strenuous and t’.cy were ot allowed to rest.
Drysdale finally rebelled. He sat down on the dock and
announced he was going to rest for ten minutes. A guard
pointed his rifle at Drysdale, ordered him to get up and
resume working. Drysdale refused.
“I’ll shoot,” said the guard, in Malay.
“Go ahead,” Drysdale replied, and remained seated.
Other guards approached. Drysdale again was ordered to
stand up and resume work or be shot. He again refused,
and repeated his defiant,
“Shoot. I’ll work when I’m rested.”
Instead of shooting they reported to the officer in charge,
who investigated and listened to Drysdale’s demands that
he and the other men were entitled to rest periods. He
agreed. Thenceforth they were allowed rest periods. How-
ever, despite what Drysdale won for his companions, they
were so frightened by his method — because the Japanese
MIGHT have shot Drysdale and them, too— that they al-
ways mistrusted him.
My electioneering for Drysdale was in vain. He ran a
poor third in the balloting. Colonial Officer Hammet was
elected British Leader to replace Penryce. Standard Oil
Engineer H. Van Asbeck, who was a baron of the Dutch
nobility, was elected to replace Van der Vliet as liaison man
between prisoners and the Japanese. That meant that in
the eyes of the Japanese Van Asbeck was Camp Leader.
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However, he actually was not because of a new S5^tem we
inaugurated in our internal affairs whereby Resident Oranje
reluctantly became Chairman of the Camp Committee and,
as such, the real head of the camp.
The maneuvering necessary to get Oranje to take respon-
sibilities many thought he should have taken from the very
beginning, coupled with the entire episode of the dogs and
the election, was a demonstration, in my opinion, of the
scarcity and crying need of real leaders. Leaders were as
necessary in prison camp as they are in the world at large.
Our community of prisoners in Palembang was a cross sec-
tion of society in general. Among us were all kinds of men,
from ne’er-do-wells to tycoons of business, industry and
government. And not one of them was a real leader. There
were men of character and integrity, but in none burned
that vital flame which inspires men to follow. None seemed
able to really break down the barriers of nationality, blood
or position that divided us. Instead of being brought closer
together by our common troubles we seemed to grow in-
creasingly suspicious of each other— suspicious that the other
fellow somehow would get more than his share. And, as in
ordinary life, the loudest complainers often did least to help
either themselves or the community. However, I noticed
one essential difference between Dutch and English mal-
contents. No matter how loudly the Hollander complained
he usually worked hard at the job assigned him; while the
British belly-acher was as lazy as he was obnoxious.
Oranje’s aversion to being target for shafts from dissatis-
fied internees was one reason for his reluctance to accept
leadership. He told me, when I asked why he did not step
into the breach when Van der Vliet resigned,
“No matter who the camp leader is, he will be handi-
capped by his inability, in a showdown, to enforce his will
because we have no laws and no agency to enforce them
even if we did.
“It seems to be the nature of men in here to rebel against
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“7
authority unless that authority is their boss in civil life and
controls their paychecks. I do not wish to make enemies in
this camp who will remain so after the war."
There was also, I suspected, the matter of his dignity,
both in relation to the Japanese and to us internees.
As Resident of Palembang, Oranje was our highest rank-
ing official. That automatically made him the natural leader
of the camp but he had declined from the beginning to
assume office on grounds it would bring him into a relation-
ship with Japanese authorities that would compel him to
recognize them as the government of Sumatra. He refused
to pay such recognition.
His objection was by-passed just before the election by a
plan which provided for Oranje to be Chairman of the
Camp Committee because of his position as Resident and
without election. That would save him the '‘indignity" of
standing election. The elected liaison man, whom Oranje
would rank, would be Camp Leader in Japanese eyes but
not in reality. Thus Oranje became a kind of power behind
the throne while the ostensible leader was Van Asbeck.
"Politically, our lives in here are just as complicated as
in ordinary life," I commented to Chief Cook Beissel after
the election. "And just as in ordinary political life the most
trifling thing sometimes will change history. Look what a
few dogs started."
That reminded Beissel of a dog story.
"Did you ever hear of the American Pied Piper of Bali?"
he asked.
I had not. Beissel told me.
Everybody knows about Bali but only those who have
been there know about its pariah dogs. They are to Bali
what the snakes were to Ireland and the rats to Hamelin
town. An American woman tourist with a love for Bali, a
large purse and a crusader’s zeal, decided to do something
about it. Beissel was one of the Dutch civil servants there
at the time who cooperated fully, glad of a chance to reduce
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the island’s canine population at no cost to the govern-
ment.
The woman sent for an American dog exterminating
specialist. He arrived equipped with catching devices and
gas chambers. But he had not envisaged the size of his
task. After long investigation, including a census that
stopped after ten thousand dogs had been counted, the
expert said the dogs would breed faster than he could
round them up for gas chambering. Most of them would
have to be exterminated by other means.
The government supplied him with rifles, ammunition
and assistants. He organized what was probably a record
pariah dog hunt. Beissel accompanied him on a half-day
expedition wherein eleven hundred dogs were killed. He
hunted and killed for eight months and finally quit in
despair without any appreciable diminution of the canine
population.
“What happened to the American lady?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Beissel.
Sea Lion Smallwood, who had waddled up to join the
conversation, ventured an opinion,
“Maybe she joined one of your American birth control
leagues to get a few pointers,” he said, and laughed until
he was purple-faced and breathless.
“Time to ring the tea bell,” said Beissel, and started for
the kitchen. I walked part way with him and asked;
“Are there any cooks among the new oil men?”
“I think there are several good ones,” he said. “Why?”
“Oh, I was just wondering. Got nothing better to wonder
about.”
Actually, I was wondering how long it would be before
someone would start a movement to get Beissel out of the
kitchen. He was a prodigious worker and an excellent cook
but that would mean little if rations got leaner and dis-
satisfied men started looking for someone to be the goat,
since they couldn’t vent their anger on the real culprits, the
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Japanese. Psychologically, that factor of being helpless to
combat the real cause of our hunger probably played a
large but unrealized part in our internal bickerings. We
couldn’t get at the Japanese so we substituted whipping
boys who were the current powers in camp life. Petty hates,
as well as malnutrition, floods and drouth, were our com-
panions in Barracks Camp and harbingers of evil days
ahead.
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Verities: Mundane and Eternal
D entist harley-clark, who with Dr.
Hollweg had been taken away from Palem-
bang Jail to work in a hospital for natives, was
returned to us in Barracks Camp. He said the Kempeitai
appeared at the hospital, brought him back to internment
but arrested Dr. Hollweg and took him to their own private
jail. Harley-Clark moved into the eight-foot-square hospital
staff room occupied by Allen, myself, a New Zealander
named Wilson and numerous rats who lay low by day and
frolicked around at night. The dentist brought with him
two small sacks of green beans which had to be protected
against the rats. We decided the safest place would be
hanging in midair, suspended on a wire from the ceiling.
Careful calculations showed that if the beans were hung
in the exact center of the room they would be four feet from
any wall, too far for a rat to jump. We retired that night
feeling sure the beans were safe. But next morning holes
had been gnawed in the sacks. Rats had proved they not
only could reach the wire but shinny up and down it.
Harley-Clark fashioned a conical tin guard around the wire
and we retired the second night, certain they could not get
around that rat guard. They did.
We greased the wire before going to bed the third night.
Strange noises awakened us. I switched on the electric light
we were allowed to burn in the clinic. There was a rat
crouched on the tin guard. Frightened by the light he had
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paused for a moment in his frantic efforts to go back up the
wire. Then he resumed them, but the grease was too thick
and slippery. He would start up and slide back, start up and
slide back. He tried again and again until finally, either
baffled or exhausted, he stopped, clung to the rat guard
and watched us. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I
fancied his sharp features were wrinkled with bewilder-
ment. Now was the time for us to act.
‘'He’s yours,” said Harley-Clark, “I can’t reach him.”
I grasped a club we had made for this specific moment
and stood up to swat the rat. He must have read my mind.
In one enormous leap he sprang from the tin, cleared the
four feet of space to the wall and scuttled out the window.
Harley-Clark took his beans to bed with him after that.
We had long hoped that Mehitabel, the cat who moved
into the clinic bedroom with us, would prove the answer to
rats but our hopes were killed and my faith in cats forever
dashed by Mehitabel’s base treachery. Mehitabel was lured
into our room by blandishments of food and luxurious shel-
ter. She had just given birth to two kittens in another part
of camp and wandered into our room obviously house hunt-
ing. Under his bed, Allen had an empty, fiberboard suitcase
with a hole in it. We put Mehitabel in the suitcase and
turned it so she could come out the hole. Delighted she
emerged from the hole, mewed her thanks and scampered
out the door. Ten minutes later she returned carrying a
kitten. A second trip brought the second kitten. Our next
problem was to keep Mehitabel from moving elsewhere
when the kittens were older.
We reasoned that if she were treated royally she would
not want to leave and so we squandered precious food on
her. Our most treasured possession was a bottle of rendered
pork fat which had cost us much negotiating and twenty
guilders. Fat was the closest thing to meat we had tasted
since early days in Palembang Jail. Every other day mem-
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BY EASTERN WINDOWS
bers of our kongsie got one teaspoonful each of melted fat
on their rice. Mehitabel was included. She loved it. Occa-
sionally our rations included dried fish and we divided
those with her. I had acquired some powdered milk I was
saving for lean times. Mehitabel got that too.
We cherished her by day and at night watched her kittens
so she could feel free to roam as she wished without fear of
harm to her offspring. At first she would not leave them
for more than a few minutes at a time. To ease her mind
Wilson and I became kitten sitters. When Mehitabel
mewed desire to roam one or the other of us would take the
kittens into our mosquito nets. Satisfied, she would leave
and be gone for hours. The arrangement pleased Mehitabel
so much she took to waking us up three or four times a
night: first to give us the kittens, then to get them back;
then to give them to us and so on. Exasperating, but we
endured it cheerfully. We wanted Mehitabel to be happy.
She consumed our pork fat and my powdered milk. The
kittens grew large enough to roam around themselves at
night. They expressed dissatisfaction with the suitcase so
we made them a new bed. They became very temperamental
but we put up with all their whims because we knew the
kittens soon would be large enough to catch rats. In fact
rats had completely avoided our bedroom since Mehitabel’s
arrival.
But when the pork fat bottle and the milk powder tin
were empty Mehitabel deserted us. She took the kittens to
another part of camp where she got nothing but indiffer-
ence and had to forage for herself. Why? Fll never know.
But ril never trust a cat again, especially a lady cat.
Among necessaries of life difficult to obtain in prison
camp were false teeth. If a man lost his real teeth he was
in a bad way.
Dentist Harley-Clark one day told a nearly toothless
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customer, “If somebody will donate a spare plate, I can
help you/'
But no one had teeth to spare until Whitey died. He went
suddenly and unexpectedly during the night. We carried
him from the ward into the clinic and laid him on a bench
to wait until the guards produced a coffin. They had a rule
bodies had to be in coffins when they were taken out for
burial. I was looping a rag around Whitey's head to hold
his jaw shut when I remembered Harley-Clark's promise.
“How about it. Doc?" I asked West.
“Good idea," he said, “maybe Harley can use them."
So I removed Whitey's plates. Harley-Clark went to work
on them and in a few days another man was eating with
Whitey's false teeth. But he never knew whence they
came.
The camp orchestra tripled in size with arrival of the new
oil men. They brought enough wire with them to supply
strings for a half dozen guitars and two bull fiddles. Finding
only two guitars in camp and no bull fiddles they made the
instruments themselves. Such an orchestra could not be
wasted on small scale productions so we staged larger ones
every month on the night the moon was full. Master of
ceremonies for several productions was an English planter
named D. F. Pratt, the nephew of an English actor, William
Henry Pratt, whose Hollywood name is Boris Karloff.
Pratt's jokes were translated into Dutch by Controleur De
Jong, who also possessed the best baritone in jail and sang
Malay love songs and lullabies. If I were a girl in love and
my boy friend could sing, there are few melodies that would
please me more than those the Malays sing when the moon
is full. My favorite was Terang Boelan, which means Clear
Moon.
When Pratt ran out of jokes his place as master of cere-
monies was taken by a young radio announcer from Singa-
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pore named Andrew Carruthers, who organized a production
team comprising Poker Shark Attenborough, an Australian
consular service man named John Quinn and a rotund
jokester named Magnay. They staged most of our shows
until illness halted them. A revue written entirely by Librar-
ian Lawson climaxed our monthly concerts. Lawson com-
posed a tuneful theme song named “Singapore Way" and
built around it a show for which we rehearsed nightly for
a month. Eric Germann and I played the parts of husband
and wife. By wearing backwards, with appropriate stitching,
a man’s black satin dressing gown, inserting the halves of
two coconut shells into a home-made brassiere, donning a
tight fitting turban bonnet and lavishing Chinese cosmetics
in the right places, I made a passable looking wife. Except
for Eric’s beard, which he declined to remove, we might
have been the gum chewing American tourists we were sup-
posed to represent. Lawson’s show was our last concert of
magnitude, because hunger was beginning to take its toll.
More and more men were cracking and becoming physically
unable or psychologically unwilling to participate in
theatricals.
When our diminishing food supplies were augmented
with soya beans we whooped for joy, only to discover in a
few days that they went through us like beebee shot. Many
internees could not digest the beans no matter how long
they were cooked. Individual men solved the bean problem
by grinding them into coarse flour which was roasted, then
sprinkled on rice. An Australian named Marning made a
mortar and pestle from a tree stump. He drilled a hole
perpendicularly through the stump, burned out a hollow
depression, carved it smooth and had a mortar. The pestle
he made from a stone fitted onto a long, heavy wooden
handle. He rented the mortar and pestle for a percentage
of flour ground.
Germann and Canadian Christie also went into the mill-
ing business, using a coffee grinder. They charged thirty-five
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cents a kilogram (seventeen cents a pound) for their labor
and figured two hours of grinding per kilogram.
In Barracks Camp our horizon, instead of being a jagged
profile of stone wall and tiled roofs as in Palembang Jail,
was a far-flung line where green trees met blue sky. Eve-
nings, therefore, we could marvel at the fantastic grandeur
of tropic sunsets and, as dusk deepened, watch lines of fly-
ing foxes winging from their jungle lairs in search of food.
The flying fox is a species of large frugivorous bat with a
fox-like head. As the weird creatures beat slowly along not
far above the tree tops, with their four and five foot wing-
spreads, they looked enormous. They reminded me of vam-
pire bats of fiction, so sinister did they appear as their dark
wings flapped silently overhead.
Immediately after sunset a solitary flying fox, as if recon-
noitering, would wing slowly over camp from east to west
and disappear. Soon came the advance guard of from three
to ten, directly on the trail of the leader and flying wide
apart. Behind them came groups in close formation and then
the main body. Hundreds of fox-bats, flying so low it seemed
we should have heard the beat of their wings, but there
was no sound. They might have been shadows, they were
so quiet. Stragglers brought up the rear and when even the
last stragglers should have passed, along would come a
single bat, like the solitary leader. We never saw them fly-
ing eastward for they returned during the night. Occasion-
ally I thought I saw single flying foxes silhouetted against
the moon. But I was never sure. They might have been ordi-
nary, smaller bats which frequented our camp and ulti-
mately furnished an article of diet for starving men.
While trying to determine one night whether the silhou-
ettes were flying foxes winging high or ordinary bats flying
low I saw my first moonlight thunderstorm.
The moon had risen full, peering over the edge of the
world like an enormous bloodshot eye dwarfing everything
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BY EASTERN WINDOWS
of earth. As it floated free of the horizon, it bled white and
shrank until it was just the moon, inanimate in space and
reflecting its cold, second-hand light that glimmered dully
on nipa palm leaves which thatched our roofs. The shadows
of men walking in the yard gradually shortened as the moon
rose higher.
In the north thunder muttered, like distant guns, and in
that direction the stars were blotted out. Slowly the curtain
which obscured them grew and blackened and moved like a
flood across the sky. Thunder sounded with a crunching
and grinding akin to rocks moving unseen but terribly alive
within the waters of a flash flood down a western arroyo.
And, as in such a flood, the earth trembled from their force.
But an invisible, supernal dyke halted the flood before it
could invade the southern sky and drown the moon. In-
stead, it piled up higher and higher in the heavens until it
seemed higher than the moon. Convulsively, with blinding
lightning bolts and ear-shattering thunder claps, the giant
sought to burst its bonds but the dyke held— a celestial
equator splitting the sky into northern and southern hemi-
spheres of storm and calm so that the moon could ride
down the middle serene and unafraid.
“Awesome spectacle, isn’t it?” crackled a husky, penetrat-
ing voice, and Wembley-Smythe ambled across the moon-
bathed yard. “Too beautiful a night to waste sleeping. Let’s
take a few turns around the quadrangle.”
We fell in step.
“Nights like this almost make me believe in a personal
God and a hereafter,” said Wembley-Smythe.
I asked him in what kind of God he did believe.
“Oh, a vast, impersonal Intelligence that started things
spinning and hasn’t bothered much with them since.”
That started us debating again about the origin of things
and he reminded me of our unfinished discussion in Palem-
bang Jail.
“Do you really doubt the existence of God?” I asked.
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“Or are you only throwing it out as a bait for argu-
ment?''
He laughed and said, “I suppose I do believe in God. It
is illogical to say things simply started by themselves. There
had to be a first cause and we call it God. However, I'm
very doubtful there is a hereafter of any kind, a heaven or
hell or anything else, beyond the grave. When the end
comes, well, I think it simply will be the end. That is why
I am neutral on the so-called eternal verities, but obviously
you are not. Why take your beliefs so seriously?"
“Because we can't be neutral about religious truth any
more than we can be neutral about mathematical truth," I
said. “One is as true as the other. But we quibble about
religious truth because it entails obligations on the believer.
If believing seven times eight equals fifty-six also meant
that we had to keep the Ten Gommandments and go to
church on Sunday, there would be a hell of a lot of debate
over whether or not seven times eight really did equal fifty-
six or some other sum; and men would split up into mathe-
matical sects, each one giving a different answer to seven
times eight, yet each one declaring that it had the only
correct answer."
“It's not quite that simple," said Wembley-Smythe. “You
can demonstrate with chalk or beans or your fingers that
seven times eight equals fifty-six but you can’t demonstrate
so easily which of the claimants to religious truth is right,
or whether all of them are wrong."
I agreed that demonstrating religious truth was not as
simple as reciting the multiplication table but insisted that
with good will on the seeker’s part, truth could be found
and had been found by countless millions since Christ
walked among men.
“You’ve got to want to find the truth and accept it with-
out reservations when you find it,” I said. “Recognizing
truth and accepting it as your standard of life are two dif-
ferent things. You can recognize it and not accept it."
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'‘What if I neither accept nor reject what you call truth,
but maintain a neutral attitude?" he asked.
"You cannot be neutral,” I said. "Being ‘neutral’ to God
is tantamount to denying Him. Christ Himself said,
‘He who is not with Me is against Me.’ Those words are
either true or not true. There is no middle way. You are
either for God or against Him. You make the choice. If
you’re against Him during your life on earth you’ll be
against Him in the next.”
"Go on,” laughed Wembley-Smythe, "say it. If I’m
against Him here, in the next I’ll fry.”
"And without benefit of palm oil,” I quipped. “Seri-
ously, however,” I said, "this internment can be a blessing
in disguise for all of us because we’ve got so much time to
think and figure out what counts most in life.”
"You’re right there,” said Wembley-Smythe, ‘‘although
I really don’t need all the time we’re having to think it out.
But go on, what else do you think?”
I said I believed the really fundamental battle lines of
the world were not between the currently contending armies
but between forces fighting to control the souls of men
and such forces were on both sides. Whatever the military
results of the war the struggle for men’s souls would go on.
"We can’t be neutral any more than a soldier in battle
can be indifferent as to which side wins, his or the enemy’s.
Neutrals will perish wondering what struck them.”
‘‘If you’re going to perish,” said Wembley-Smythe, "what
does it matter whether you die knowing or not knowing
what hit you? You will be dead anyway.”
"Your body will be dead, yes, but not your soul,” I said.
"How do you think a neutral soul will fare when it stands in
judgment before God? There’s a passage in the New Testa-
ment that gives a good hint. It goes something like ‘because
you are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm I am about to
vomit you out of my mouth.’ ”
"You’re too vehement,” said Wembley-Smythe, "and
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we’re right back where we started. In the last analysis you
have to accept on faith that you have a soul that is im-
mortal and that it will be judged after death. None of
those beliefs is demonstrable.”
“Not by test tube methods, no,” I agreed. “But faith in
the eternal verities is not a matter of test tube proof. It is
belief because of the veracity and authority of a witness
whose veracity and authority are unimpeachable. It is be-
lieving a thing because someone who knows and who
would not deceive you tells you it is true. Faith is neither a
pious feeling of sweetness and light nor a haunting premoni-
tion of doom. It is as solid and real as the air in your lungs
or as the certainty that there is another side to the moon or
as the knowledge that seven times eight does equal fifty-
SIX.
“You mentioned believing a thing because someone
who would not deceive you tells you it is true,” said
Wembley-Smythe. “There's the weak link in your reason-
ing. You are accepting someone else’s word.”
“Certainly, we go through life accepting other people’s
words for most of the things we think and do. If your
mother tells you about an episode in her childhood do you
dispute it because you weren’t there? Or do you call Ein-
stein a liar because your mind can not grasp the theory of
relativity? All of recorded history is taking other people’s
words for things that happened. You take almost anybody’s
word for anything except the most important thing— that
you have an immortal soul. I take Christ’s word there is a
hereafter because my reason tells me He proved beyond all
doubt that He was a qualified authority to speak about the
hereafter.”
Wembley-Smythe remained unimpressed.
“We’ll simply never agree,” he said. “I’d like to know
whether there is anything after death, but I don’t. And I
doubt very much that there is. As I said before, when the
end comes, well, I think it simply will be the end.
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“If I’m wrong I’ll find out when I awaken someday stand-
ing outside the Pearly Gates; and if I’m right, there won’t
be any awakening at all, will there? Just an eternal blackout.
How dreadfully boring if one were compelled to be aware
of it!”
We walked in silence for a while. The moon was drifting
westward to retire. We decided to follow suit.
“Good night,” we told each other, “good night.”
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The Reckoning
T he Japanese cracked down in the third quarter
of 1943. The crack-down came in the form of
a well planned pogrom throughout southern
Sumatra both inside and outside of war prisoner camps. In
Palembang itself Ambonese died by the hundreds and
Chinese by the score. The mortality rate among interned
Hollanders was considerably lower. I know of eight who
were beheaded and perhaps a score who were sentenced to
seven-year terms at hard labor in special Kempeitai prisons.
Indirectly, however, hundreds of prisoners died during the
next two years because rations were drastically reduced.
Looking back it is apparent that the Kempeitai began
preparing for the purge nearly a year before it happened. A
preliminary was building of Barracks Camp which began
coincident with stories in the local Malay language news-
paper condemning rumor mongering. Shortly thereafter,
and while we were still in the jail, newspaper announce-
ments said all radios in possession of natives had to be re-
ported for inspecting and licensing. Unlicensed radios were
forbidden. Javanese guards told us that “licensing’' meant
that all radios capable of receiving short wave broadcasts
were confiscated.
A front page Malay language editorial signed by Lieuten-
ant General H. Kasai, Governor of South Sumatra, said,
“Natives are filled with propaganda that the Allies will land
here and destroy the Japanese. Such reports are false and
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ridiculous. The Allies could long ago have been destroyed
completely.
“However, although the Allies will never be able to
resurrect their strength sufficiently to land troops in force
here, they probably will attempt air raids or try to land
small groups of men by submarine. Therefore, the people of
Palembang must expect anything but also must have confi-
dence in Nippon’s strength and once again hit at the false
propaganda from the enemy which is being spread by radio
or other means.”
We had just finished translating the editorial and were
discussing it when a trumpet sounded somewhere outside.
The notes came closer and closer. Whoever played them
was moving along the street toward the jail. The music
sounded high and clear and grew louder. We ran to the
front gate to peer out and see who the player was. We were
just in time to glimpse a bicycle ricksha bearing a passenger
who was blowing the trumpet. The ricksha peddled slowly
past. The music died away down the street, playing the same
tune over again, “Whispering.”
It started us whispering among ourselves. Were unknown
native friends outside trying to tell us something? Fanciful
as it sounds now, at the time it was incredibly heartening
to prisoners grasping at straws of encouragement. From that
day onward we began to hear persistent rumors of anests
among Palembang’s Ambonese and Chinese population.
After we left the jail and moved to Barracks Camp,
Javanese guards confirmed the rumors as facts and told us
that we had been transferred so the jail could be used as
a Kempeitai prison.
In July, 1943, news of Allied landings in Sicily, of Musso-
lini’s “resignation” and the succession of Badoglio appeared
in the Malay newspaper. Joy swept Barracks Camp. But on
the heels of our elation came ominous developments in
Palembang. Nearly all Ambonese men in the city and many
women were rounded up and crammed into Palembang
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Jail. Javanese guards said the Ambonese were bound hand
and foot, tied in twos, back to back, and given water only
once a day. Most of them died.
Illicit radios and arms were said to have been found in
homes of Ambonese who were accused of operating a Dutch
sponsored underground.
Dr. Ziesel of Charitas hospital was arrested.
A friendly Japanese doctor told Dr. West that a radio
transmitter had been discovered operating somewhere on
the coast; therefore, we could expect more prisoners to be
crowded in with us.
“When we are going forward and winning," said the
doctor, “we must take prisoners and intern them; if we lose
and retreat, we must take more."
He unsheathed his sword and pointed to stains on the
blade near the hilt.
“Two heads," he laughed. “Cut off in Malaya."
He sheathed the sword and said he would hke to help us
but he could not. He had been ordered to be more strict on
admitting prisoners to Charitas. As for food, we would get
less because “rice is so expensive."
Kempeitai agents called at Barracks Camp and took away
Resident Oranje and his secretary, an Indo-European named
Lubblik-Weddik. Lubblik had been the chief guitarist of
our concerts. Soon the Kempeitai men returned and re-
moved more government servants plus four bankers and
two coal mine operators. Most of them, including Oranje,
were returned in a few weeks, badly frightened men. They
had seen companions— who did not return— emerge broken
from torture grilling by the Kempeitai who accused the
Dutch of having instituted and financed the alleged Am-
bonese underground.
Kempeitai headquarters was in the former residence of
a Dutch banker named Geroms, who was among those
arrested. Ironically, Geroms died in his own house after
weeks of torture. Prisoners in the room next to his said
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Geroms defied his inquisitors to the end. They eould hear
blows rained on his body and Geroms, between moans, jeer
at his torturers:
“Hit me again. Hit me again. When the Amerieans eome
they will hit you.”
“When the Amerieans eome,” was a popular phrase
among the Duteh and, judging from newspaper editorial
fulminations, was also frequently whispered among the
natives. Our Indonesian guards said it when Japanese were
out of earshot, but they used it with different shades of
meaning, contingent upon whether they were Javanese
secretly friendly or Malays many of whom were hostile.
Oranje returned to Barracks Camp convinced there were
informers among us who told the Japanese everything we
said or did. He ordered Camp News discontinued and all
back numbers destroyed. Because of increased clinic work
I had ceased editing the newspaper shortly after coming to
the new camp. My successor as editor was the Australian
consular man, John Quinn. Whether Quinn destroyed the
back numbers issued during his editorship I didn’t ask but
I considered mine too precious as souvenirs to be burned.
Instead I buried them. Nick Koot, the young Shell Oil
engineer who told me the glass eye story, made the neces-
sary container for me. Using empty cans and solder, he
fashioned a cylinder of two thicknesses of tin with insula-
tion between the layers. Acting on a hunch that the Japa-
nese soon might search the camp I decided also to bury my
diaries.
The bicycle inner tube I had bought before my capture,
also on a hunch, now proved its worth. We cut it into
strips and used them to seal three wide-mouthed bottles
which once had contained quinine tablets. Inside the bottles
were my diaries. Where to bury them worried me next.
The best place, I thought, was under the cement founda-
tion of the hospital. Even if the camp were destroyed the
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foundation would still be there as a landmark after the
war. But digging under the foundation unobserved was im-
possible in a crowded camp filled with curious eyes. It had
to be done so openly that no one would be curious. I en-
listed the aid of the hospital general handyman, J. F. Jones,
who could hammer, saw, or excavate with impunity. Jones
dug a shallow trench alongside the foundation ostensibly to
change the course of the water pipe running to the hospital
kitchen. At distances of 27, 30 and 33 feet from the south-
east corner of the foundation he burrowed under the edge
of the cement and inserted the tin and the bottles. Then
he filled in the trench, loudly berating people who kept
changing their minds about where a pipeline should be laid.
One week later Kempeitai agents thoroughly ransacked
the camp. That was the first and last time the Japanese
ever did a complete job of searching us. And even that job
was poorly executed. The searchers tired quickly, too
many bugs. For an hour or so they were painstakingly
thorough, and since they began with the hospital they went
through it inch by inch, but after a few hours they grew
careless and the last stages of the search consisted in little
more than a helter-skelter tearing apart of men’s belong-
ings and scattering them on the ground.
Next day trucks disgorged a score of sick men at the gate.
Charitas had been closed and its patients returned to their
respective camps.
The Japanese had been gradually tightening up at Chari-
tas ever since the previous January, when Mrs. Curran-
Sharp, wife of our camp poet, was caught smuggling sixty-
two letters into the hospital. She was not punished, indi-
vidually, the Japanese said, because the letters only proved
the men had been smuggling letters too. From that time
on it became more difficult to get patients into Charitas.
Surgeon Peter Tekelenburg and Mother Alacoque, the hos-
pital superior, sent word to us they feared Charitas would be
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closed eventually. Their fears materialized in September,
1943 -
Dr. Tekelenburg accompanied the patients to Barracks
Camp. He moved into our hospital staff quarters and gave
Dr. West what small surgieal instruments he had been able
to salvage and hide in his pockets.
“You had better keep these,” he said, “because I fear
the Kempeitai are going to arrest me.”
They did, and also Mother Alacoque who had been sent
to the Women’s Camp. Later, the Japanese informed us
they had sentenced Dr. Tekelenburg and Mother Alacoque
to seven years in military prison for “aiding the enemy.”
The enemy was us. The doctor and the nun were paying for
the letters and money smuggled through Charitas to the
men’s and women’s camps.
The Kempeitai charged that the money was connected
in some way with the alleged Ambonese underground. They
said the Ambonese and Menadonese in Palembang had
colleeted funds to give the Allies should the Allies invade
Sumatra. However, the Kempeitai never did discover Dr.
Tekelenburg’s radio or that news from it was relayed
through Charitas. If they had, he and Mother Alacoque
probably would have been executed, as happened to an-
other man, in another camp, whose hidden radio was dis-
covered.
Not until after the war did we learn the ultimate fates
of those arrested. Dr. Tekelenburg and 171 Ambonese and
Menadonese were manacled to long chains and transported
to a prison camp named Soengei Liat on the island of
Bangka. Only seven survived the war. Dr. Tekelenburg was
among the dead. In another group fifty-one Ambonese were
shot, beaten, or stabbed to death October 30, 1943, on the
edge of a large pit on Palembang’s outskirts.
Dr. Ziesel and nine Ambonese were executed, by be-
heading, November 9, 1943. Oranje’s secretary, Lubblik-
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Weddik, with three Chinese and some Indonesians, was
executed November 14, 1944.
Mother Alacoque and four Ambonese women sentenced
to prison with her survived. The nun was forced to kneel,
hour after hour, with her hands behind her and her head
bare and bowed, while she was grilled by Kempeitai in-
quisitors. They learned nothing from her.
Among other Dutch executed in 1943 and 1944 were
Resident Myndersma, of the Lampong district, in whose
possession the Japanese found a quantity of letters written
by internees to their wives in Java to be smuggled by a
native courier; Police Commissioner Kamphuis, of Tand-
jong Karang, who confessed to hiding a radio; Resident
Maier, of the Benkoelen district, and three other men.
Veer of Tandjong Karang; Walter of Tandjong Enim, and
Stammershaus of Lahat, all accused of either destroying
money so the Japanese could not confiscate it when they
first arrived or of helping finance the alleged underground.
I was never able to confirm to my own satisfaction that a
systematized underground, directed by the Dutch, really
had existed in south Sumatra, although one did operate in
some other parts of the Indies.
Bishop Mekkelholt was among those who returned from
Charitas. He brought copies of the Singapore newspaper,
telling of a second exchange of nationals between the
United States and Japan. With sinking heart I saw I had
missed another chance. The second exchange ship, like the
first a year before, would pass through Sunda Straits where
my lifeboat had made landfall in 1942.
I did not know, of course, that on the ship was prisoner
of war mail and in the mail a card I had written the previous
March. It arrived home two days before Christmas, 1943.
That was the first news they had of me after Java fell.
United Press followed that lead, through the International
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Red Cross, and in 1944 received word that my name was no
longer among prisoners of war in Sumatra. They decided
then, as did almost everyone except my family, that I had
died after writing the card.
On September 14, 1943, within a few days of Charitas’
closing, we were ordered to pack for a move to an undis-
closed destination. We hoped it would be to Java, where
we understood war prisoners were better fed. Our spirits
were especially buoyed by a paragraph in the Palembang
newspaper which said a repatriation ship was leaving
Batavia, Java, September 23rd. We had wild hopes that
some of us, at least, might sail on it.
We were cheerful men as we marched through Palem-
bang before dawn and boarded a boat in the Moesi river.
When daylight came we were moving downstream, toward
the sea, and our hopes of going to Java soared.
But our ebullience changed to apprehension when the
boat left the river mouth and, instead of turning southward
to pass through the straits which lie between Sumatra and
the little island of Bangka, continued right across them and
by midafternoon approached the island itself.
Ever since arriving in Palembang Jail I had heard tales of
the horrors of Bangka Straits and Bangka Island and its port
of Muntok. Forty-odd ships— ranging from less than 100 to
several thousand tons— jammed with refugees fleeing
Singapore, had been sunk in the Straits in February, 1942.
A majority of the estimated three thousand passengers on
them perished. Most survivors swam or floated ashore on
Bangka beach and, after being rounded up, spent a harrow-
ing month in the prison at Muntok. Everything they had
since experienced was as nothing, they said, compared with
the Bangka Straits and Muntok Prison. They talked as
though they had been delivered from the jaws of hell in-
stead of from a man-made jail.
As we approached Muntok that September afternoon.
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Eric pointed out a distant promontory, scarcely distinguish-
able in the haze. On the other side of the promontory, he
said, was a lighthouse which had been a saving beacon to
some of his companions but to most had been only a light
which blinked tantalizingly in their eyes as they drowned.
On the beach, not far from the lighthouse, Eric had been
executed and left for dead by a Japanese patrol.
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The Saga of Eric Germann
E ric germann, my American fellow prisoner,
was the only man I ever met who was executed
and lived to tell about it. His adventure began
when, wearing a pair of high leather boots and a fireman’s
helmet donned while helping fight Singapore’s bomb-set
conflagrations, he boarded the S.S. Vyner-Brooke, a 700-odd
ton passenger-freighter built for and named after the Eng-
lishman known as the White Rajah of Sarawak, in Borneo.
When Eric first saw the vessel in burning, bomb-shattered
Singapore harbor he thought he was looking at a marvel-
ously reduced copy of a large Cunard liner. For war pur-
poses her white surface had been painted battle-ship gray,
her bridge bundled up with mattresses, her windows and
portholes covered and she was armed with a rack of depth
charges, two Y guns and a three-inch anti-submarine gun.
“She looked tough, chunky and reliable,” said Eric, “and
I sure was glad to get aboard her.”
Most of the 250 passengers were women, children and
old men, plus a few able-bodied fellows like Eric who had
been given special permits to leave beleaguered Singapore.
Sixty-three Australian army nurses were assigned cots on the
promenade deck. White European civilians packed the din-
ing saloon and Eurasians were jammed in the after-hatch.
Remaining passengers were sprawled about the decks, corri-
dors and companionways. The forward hatch held the Chi-
nese crew which had been replaced in operating the ship by
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some Malays with British naval ratings and a few British
army lads picked up because of their previous marine
experience.
The Vyner-Brooke threaded her way through the harbor’s
mine field, closely followed by another refugee-laden vessel,
the Mata Hari. Aboard the Mata Hari were Doc West and
Direct Action Drysdale. The two vessels moved slowly past
the inferno of burning oil tanks that was Singapore’s oil
storage depot on Bukum island, past the hulk of a blazing
ship, away from the flaming glow of the water-front and its
lurid reflection in the harbor; moved out of ear-shot of
rumbling guns and exploding bombs, straight south into
the quiet night.
Eric went to sleep lying between a grossly fat English
civil engineer whose most recent job had been camouflaging
Malayan airports, and a middle-aged couple from South
Africa, Mr, and Mrs. Buridge.
Six Japanese bombers found the Vyner-Brooke about
2 p.M. February 14. She zigzagged so successfully that
twenty-six bombs missed her but the twenty-seventh
smashed through the forward hatch, exploded inside the
ship and blew a hole in the keel. A Malay crew member
rushed onto the deck from a passageway. His hair and cloth-
ing had been burned off, leaving only his shoes, belt and
shreds of his shorts which were still smoldering. The Malay’s
body was covered with immense, flat blisters and yellow
froth exuded from his mouth and eyes. He tried to speak
but could only gurgle incoherently. Eric extinguished his
smoldering shorts and asked two nurses to take him to a
lifeboat.
The Vyner-Brooke was filling rapidly and listing. Life
belts had been issued the night before and passengers in-
structed that, in case of sinking, they were to descend into
the water via ropes or Jacob’s ladders and wait to be picked
up by lifeboats and liferafts. The boats when lowered would
still be secured to the ship by long drag lines. The rafts
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would float free as the ship sank. There was little talking
and no panic as the order was given to abandon ship, only
a general uncertainty what to do.
Looking over the side Eric saw that the last boat he had
helped lower had lodged directly beneath a water condenser
outlet and was rapidly filling. He hopped over the rail,
slithered down a Jacob’s ladder and into the boat. He
loosened the drag line, allowing the boat to drift farther
back and out of the outlet’s path. Then he discovered the
real reason it was filled with water. Bomb fragments had
holed it, as well as three other starboard lifeboats. Only
their sealed, empty air tanks kept them afloat.
Women were coming over the tilting sides of the Vyner-
Brooke in a steady file, lowering themselves into the sea
and bobbing helplessly away with the current. Eric realized
that they would be swept away from any possible assistance
before the liferafts would float free. He determined to get
back on deck and, despite contrary instructions, to shove
off the liferafts.
He had to swim from the lifeboat to the ladder and,
even with his life belt, his heavy boots dragged him under,
but he made it. Eric was an expert swimmer and once had
been a lifeguard at a New York boys’ camp. Hooking one
leg over the ladder’s lowest rung and with his face under-
water he shucked off his life belt as being too cumbersome
for movement, then unlaced and removed his boots. De-
scending women, still wearing their high heels, used his
head as a stepping stone into the sea. Each time he removed
his face from the water to gulp air he berated the women
for their inconsiderateness,
“I should have saved my breath though,” he told me,
“for as I began creeping up the ladder they cursed me, and
just as fluently as any man. But they had a peculiar reason
for swearing at me. They shrieked that I was crawling up
the ladder as they came down just so I could look up their
legs!
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“Such modesty stunned me. I wheezed myself to the rail
without being able to think of a reply.”
Eric reached the deck only to have four-year-old Mischa
Warmen thrust into his arms. Mischa was the son of a
White Russian couple from Shanghai. When the first
bombs fell Mischa’s panic-stricken father leaped overboard.
His wife screamed,
“He can’t swim. Somebody save him. He can’t swim!”
“I’ll get him,” yelled a British soldier and jumped into
the sea.
He reached Mr. Warmen but the frightened White Rus-
sian seized him around the neck and both men disappeared.
Mrs. Warmen collapsed. She was unable to help either her-
self or her son as the Vyner-Brooke sank. A soldier assisted
her over the ship’s side and someone else handed Mischa
to Eric.
“Don’t be afraid,” Eric told the child. “We’re just going
to jump into the water for a nice, cool swim.”
Calmly Mischa put his arms around Eric’s neck. Eric held
his hand over the child’s mouth and nose and jumped.
Mischa was quiet and smiling when they bobbed to the
surface and they both laughed.
Eric swam to the nearly submerged lifeboat and placed
the child inside. The fat civil engineer was floating nearby
screaming for help. Eric thrashed after him, silenced his
cries, towed him to the boat, boosted him in and told him
to look after the child. A wounded soldier was Eric’s next
customer. Six or seven people in all got inside the boat and
cut the fall line. Eric clambered in himself, picked up an
oar and pulled. The boat was barely afloat, crowded and
ringed with people clinging to the looped handlines on the
sides.
Screams from a nearby liferaft attracted attention of
rowers. They were amazed to see a woman being pushed off
the raft by other women. She swam to the boat screaming
for help. Eric recognized her as a Eurasian hairdresser
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named Marie, who had busied herself on shipboard helping
old people and the sick. The all-white occupants of the raft
would spare no room for a Eurasian.
“Take her back or we’ll capsize you,” Eric yelled.
His rowing companions supported him, cursed the
women for their hard-heartedness and maneuvered the boat
alongside the raft as though to carry out their threat of
capsizing it. The women pulled Marie back aboard.
The Vyner-Brooke turned turtle and disappeared in a
smear of fuel oil. One Japanese bomber returned to the
scene, skimmed low over the sea, machine-gunned a life-
boat and flew away.
Ginger Sedgeman, chief mate of the Vyner-Brooke^ swam
up and joined the ring of people clinging to the hand lines.
Three empty liferafts floated into sight. Men swam after
them, attached them to the boat with a long line. Everyone
except rowers then was transferred to the rafts and the long
pull began to Bangka Island, just visible in the distance.
After sundown they saw flashings from two lighthouses
about five miles apart on the coast. Midway between them
burned a large bonfire. They pulled for the fire.
Water covered the boat seats on which they sat to row.
A breeze sprang up, chilling them through their sodden
shirts. Eric removed his, handing it for safekeeping to the
fat civil engineer who had proved so useless at an oar he
no longer rowed. The engineer let the garment float away.
They landed near the bonfire about half past eight and
found around it approximately thirty survivors who had
reached shore earlier. The Vyner-Brooke First Officer was
there, some soldiers, sailors, nurses and civilian women and
children. Eric sat hunched on the sand, his knees drawn
up and his head between them. Despite the fire he shivered.
He resolved to walk higher up the beach, find dryer sand
and dig into it to escape the wind.
As he gathered his strength to move three nurses walked
out of the darkness. They said a companion was lying
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wounded on the beach about a mile away. Would some
men go and carry her in? No one responded.
“She can't walk," said one nurse. “Somebody must get
her."
Pretending not to hear, the watchers only stared into the
fire. They were tired themselves. Eric’s head was clearing
of its dizziness. He stood up.
“Come on," he said harshly, “who’ll go with me?"
Only one man replied, an English boy who had rowed
on the same seat with Eric in the lifeboat.
“I’ll go,” he said, and left the fire.
Using two borrowed shirts and two oars, they improvised
a stretcher. The English lad made a final plea.
“Won’t somebody else come and take turns carrying
her?"
No answer.
“To hell with you then," he said and with Eric set off
down the beach.
They found the nurse, her left breast nearly ripped off by
a bomb fragment, and carried her back. Eric was so tired he
nearly vomited from fatigue. He staggered higher up the
beach, near the jungle edge, where lay the bones of an old
fishing hut. Finding a section of woven palm leaf roofing
he stuck it into the sand for a windbreak, scooped out a
hollow for his body and lay down. Sleep came instantly.
The next day, Sunday, more shipwreck survivors joined
the group. They spent the day foraging on the jungle edge
for coconuts and pineapples and for material to make
stretchers to transport the severely wounded. Malay fisher-
men appeared late that afternoon with bad news. Bangka
was entirely in Japanese hands. The nearest food or habita-
tion was the occupied port of Muntok. The fishermen led
them along the beach to where a path emerged from the
jungle. They said it was a short cut to Muntok.
Sedgeman volunteered to hike into Muntok and request
a Japanese military escort to give the refugees safe conduct
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past any hostile patrols into internment. It was agreed he
should leave early next day. By nightfall there were gathered
on the beach approximately 70 men, women and children,
many in need of medical attention. Mrs. Warmen was
among them, reunited with her son Mischa. Marie, the hair-
dresser, also was there, an unpopular reminder to the women
who had shoved her off the raft and been compelled to take
her back again.
The Malay who had been so severely burned by the
bomb-flash on the Vyner-Brooke had been brought ashore
in a lifeboat but died shortly afterward. He was buried in
the sand, after much tugging and pushing, because rigor
mortis had stiffened his outflung arms and legs and he
wouldn’t fit into the narrow trench scooped out for him.
Sedgeman left for Muntok Monday at daybreak. Shortly
after he had gone a metal lifeboat drifted ashore bearing
six soldiers. One was mortally wounded, died within an hour
and was buried beside the Malay. Another, named Kingsley,
became the sixth stretcher case. The other five stretcher
cases were Mr. Buridge, the South African, who had a bomb
fragment in his kidneys; an elderly retired magistrate from
Malaya named Watson, the nurse with the ripped breast
and two civilian women with shrapnel wounds.
About nine o’clock it was decided that the civilian women
and children, led by an elderly Australian miner and two
soldiers whose arm wounds prevented them from being
stretcher bearers, should start along the trail. Able-bodied
men and twenty-one Australian nurses would follow with
the stretchers. The nurses had fashioned a Red Cross flag
to carry at the head of their own procession and each of
them had an indentifying arm band. Mrs. Buridge elected
to stay with her husband and so joined the nurses.
Hardly had the first group disappeared when out of the
same trail came Sedgeman leading ten Japanese soldiers
and a tiny officer wearing a long sword. The officer ordered
the men and women to form two lines, then barked at his
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men. Four soldiers took up sentry posts on the flanks of the
lines. The officer surveyed the group in silence for so long
that, one by one, all but eight men broke rank and resumed
work on the stretchers. The officer conferred with one of
his soldiers and finally, by gesturing, ordered the eight men
who were still standing in line to walk down the beach. He
followed with six soldiers, two of whom carried a machine
gun. The four sentries remained, bayoneted rifles at ready.
The soldiers and their eight prisoners climbed over a
small promontory of rocks and driftwood about two hun-
dred feet away and disappeared. Three shots, exploding in
quick succession, sounded from beyond the promontory.
After a long silence another shot was heard, but muffled,
as though the gun muzzle had been pressed against some-
thing soft. Then another silence.
The stretcher workers looked apprehensively at each
other but, except for a murmured “afraid they're gone," no
one spoke.
Soon the officer and two soldiers reappeared, climbing
over the rocks. They returned to the stretchers and ordered
the remaining ten men to march. Chief Mate Sedgeman,
the First Officer and another man, pointing to their epau-
lettes, protested they were officers and expected treatment
appropriate to their rank. The Japanese officer shouted
them down.
Eric and Sedgeman were ordered to lift the old magis-
trate, who had been sitting up in his stretcher, and carry
him between them. Slowly the doomed prisoners walked
toward the promontory. Eric suddenly grasped at a desper-
ate straw. He stopped and called to the ofiBcer. The proces-
sion halted.
From his shorts pocket Eric pulled a swollen, water
soaked wallet containing his passport and $900 in twenty-
dollar bills.
“I hoped the passport with its gold seal would impress
him and he might change his mind," Eric told me.
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The officer studied it intently but ended by throwing it
on the sand. In drawing out the passport some of the
twenty-dollar bills also had come with it. Sight of them in
Eric's hand caused the officer to burst into a furious tirade.
Obviously he thought Eric had tried to bribe him.
Picking up a piece of driftwood he swung it at Eric's
face. Eric warded off the blow with an upraised hand and
threw the wallet and its contents after the passport.
“I won’t need the money any more,” he thought.
He and Sedgeman then picked up Magistrate Watson
and labored down the beach. They had difficulty getting
him over the pile of rocks and driftwood and the officer
motioned them to leave the magistrate. They placed him
so he was sitting leaning against a log and shook hands with
the old man.
“Goodbye,” they told Watson, and climbed down the
rocks onto the beach.
They were in a small cove. At the water’s edge, lying
face down, sprawled the bodies of those who had gone be-
fore them. Eric saw only seven bodies. He wondered about
the eighth. Remembering the first quick shots he presumed
the eighth man had made a dash for the sea and been cut
down by rifle fire. The last muflled shot must have been the
coup de grace for some one who did not die quickly enough.
The others had not been killed by bullets. That was obvious
from the wound in the back of the body nearest him, the
young Englishman who had helped him carry the nurse to
the fire. There was a short red wound under his left shoulder
blade. The instrument that had made it, and similar wounds
on the other bodies, was a bayonet.
Three soldiers stood near the bodies, wiping their
bayonets with rags; polishing them carefully as though
anxious to have naught but the cleanest steel for the next
job.
A machine gun was ready to sweep the little strip of
beach should anyone attempt to run.
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Eric and his companions were ordered to stand in line
facing the sea. He noticed two men blindfold themselves
with their handkerchiefs. He was impressed by the quietness
of the entire tableau. No one spoke. He looked out over the
water. The hazy sky and sea seemed especially beautiful
this morning.
“What a stupid way to die,” he thought. “And what a
strange ending— here in the morning sun on a strange island,
far from anything familiar or any friend.”
He recalled the assortment of unusual places he had vis-
ited during a wandering life, but none more strange than
this. He thought of his family— his brother and his brother's
wife and his mother. They would never know how or where
he died.
In his mind's eye he saw his mother as she taught him
his prayers when he was a child. Across the years he heard
her telling him,
“Eric boy, if you are ever in danger, put yourself in God's
hands and say His prayer.”
He began, “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be
Thy Name . . .”
At that moment the First Officer, standing on the other
end of the line, dashed for the sea. The machine gun
chattered. He fell to one knee, rose, stumbled again as the
firing continued and slumped to a halt on his right shoulder
directly in front of Eric. He was dead, bleeding from a
multitude of holes.
Eric continued praying, slowly and with more fervor
than he had known existed in him. He was saying “deliver
us from evil” when he was aware that he was no longer
standing but instead lying face down on the beach. His
hands were clasped under him, pressing palm upward at the
right side of his chest. His face was turned slightly to the
left. His mouth was open and full of sand and water. That
is, it would be full of water one moment and empty the
next. He realized the reason— tiny wavelets on the oiiter-
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most edge of the sea were surging and receding, surging and
receding. His mind was clear. It told him to lie relaxed and
still as death and to let the waves bob his head. It told him
that with each incoming wave his head could bob naturally
and turn sideways just a fraction of a hair. On the incoming
rise he could inhale slightly and quickly, like a swimmer;
and, as the wave receded, exhale slightly and slowly . . .
but so minutely the Japanese could detect no movement.
They were shooting men who moved.
He heard noises of a man vomiting and thrashing as
though his body were flopping up and down on the sand. A
shot cracked. Silence.
He heard a moan almost in his own ear and felt a body
writhe against him. BANG! The body lay still.
His own guts crawled and the back of his neck felt as
though a rifle muzzle were breathing down it. What wind
he had inside him he held, waiting for the bullet to crash
into his skull. But it did not come. And did not come. AND
DID NOT COME!
By playing dead successfully he might avert it altogether.
He knew he might be dying from a bayonet thrust but he
was unaware of pain.
Metal struck against metal. Feet scuflFed. Probably they
were dismounting the machine gun. After that the only
sounds were lapping water. However, he did not move, ex-
cept for an almost imperceptible twist of his head with each
wave so he could look, eventually, along the beach. He got
his head around so that he could peek between his eyelids
and see a southward section of the beach. No Japanese. But
he could not risk their being just out of range, sitting at the
jungle edge watching. Slowly, he let the waves turn his head
until, after an interminable time, he could look north
toward the promontory. No Japanese. But he waited. And
it was well he did. Two soldiers appeared on the rocks and
surveyed the cove. One of them waved a small flag, as
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though signaling by semaphore to where the other soldiers
must be with the nurses. The Japanese disappeared.
Still Eric lay there, straining his senses to detect the
slightest sound behind him. How long he waited was im-
possible to know. He wished he could estimate the time so
as to guess whether all the soldiers reasonably could be pre-
sumed to have gone.
Finally he decided to act. He tested his legs, his hips, his
arms for life and found them responsive. The moment of
preparing to spring up was the tensest of his life. He suf-
fered agonies of doubt in the time it took to gather his
muscles. What if they were still there, waiting to cut him
down? He took his hands away from his ribs, turned them
over to press against the sand and push him upward. He
counted.
'‘One . . . two . . . three!"
And, flexing his knees beneath him, he sprang, hurling
his body sideways and whirling to scan the beach. It was
empty but for the dead. In the instant that his eyes flicked
over their still forms one body especially stamped itself on
Eric's consciousness. The corpse of the fat civil engineer
was sitting upright, its sightless eyes looking out over the
Straits. Eric ran up the slope into the jungle.
Thorny undergrowth cut his bare feet. He ducked back
to the beach and ran south, skipping in and out of the trees
and looking back to see if he had been spotted. For about
a mile he ran like that until he came to a stream flowing
into the sea. Turning up the stream he scrambled along
until he was invisible from the beach. Then he lay on his
back and rested.
After a while the pain came and he examined his wounds.
The pain filled his back and chest with a dull throb. Blood
oozed from a wound on his lower right chest where his
hands had been clutched when he found himself lying on
the beach. Reaching around he felt another wound on his
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back, opposite the one in front. The bayonet had gone into
his back and out his chest.
He wondered why he was still alive and how long it
would take to die if he were bleeding to death inside. He
figured the bleeding must be mostly inside because there
was surprisingly little outside. Still, if he was bleeding to
death internally he would be weaker and have difficulty
breathing. And he felt all right, except for the pain and
fatigue. He could only wait and see what developed. He
waited, lying there all day and all night, fighting mosquitoes
and ants. Next morning he ventured to the jungle edge and
peered out. Nothing. Crossing the stream he headed south,
hoping to find a kampong—as a Malay village is called—
where he could get food. He met three disconsolate sur-
vivors of another ship walking north. They said the light-
house further south had been bombed and gutted. Eric led
them north, back across the stream, to the fatal cove. There
were the bodies of his executed companions. Sedgeman it
was who had moaned and writhed against him and been
silenced by a bullet. The fat engineer still sat there, one leg
doubled beneath him, his wide open eyes staring at the
water. On the pile of rocks and driftwood, still leaning
against the log where he had been placed, was the old
magistrate. His skull had been bashed in. Flies buzzed
around the mess that had been his head.
Eric found the nurses too. However, they had been shot,
not bayoneted. The bodies he examined had single bullet
holes at the base of the skulls. Rifle shots. He wondered at
no evidence of machine-gunning. He presumed, from the
way they were widely scattered along the water’s edge, that
some bodies had floated away when the tide went out. Four
bodies lay huddled in one group and three in another. A
red-haired nurse was lying higher on the beach than the
others. Her skull had been crushed but the sea had washed
it clean. Flies were everywhere.
The stretchers also were where they had been left and in
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them the patients lay staring sightlessly at the sky. Two
stretchers were empty. One had been the old magistrate's
and the other the wounded soldier Kingsley's. What had
become of Kingsley? Buridge, the South African, and the
three women had been bayoneted in the chest. Thinking
perhaps Kingsley had survived bayoneting and crawled into
the jungle they searched the immediate area and called his
name. No answer.
Still scattered on the beach were some of Eric’s twenty-
dollar bills. He did not bother to pick them up. Of what
use was money? What he needed was food.
Abandoning the search they continued north, ultimately
met some Malay fishermen who gave them water but had
no food to spare. Muntok was the nearest food. It was that
or starve.
In Muntok Japanese soldiers received him casually and
directed him to a cinema where he found the women, chil-
dren and old men who had walked away from the beach
Monday morning. They had met the same patrol, guided
by Sedgeman, which had executed Eric’s companions.
Why had the first group been ignored and the second
slaughtered? Inexplicable Japanese.
Not only did the fate of a prisoner vary according to the
individual Japanese who found him but also according to
the particular moment the Japanese found him. The Japa-
nese soldier seemed to possess the personality of a Dr. Jekyl
and Mr. Hyde. He could be gentleman or beast with equal
naturalness and facility. However, except for war time condi-
tions on battlefield or in prison camp, the gentleman pre-
vailed in all the Japanese I have ever personally known. In
their own country, where I worked before the war, I never
experienced an unkindness or a discourtesy.
Soon after Eric’s arrival refugees in the cinema were
moved into Muntok Prison. There Mischa Warmen’s
mother died of pneumonia, leaving her little son an orphan.
There, also, Eric learned why he had seen only seven bodies
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in the cove when his group arrived for execution. The
eighth man, a Vyner-Brooke crew member named Lloyd,
had run into the sea before the Japanese set up their machine
gun. Three rifle bullets clipped him superficially but he
dove, swam under water and made good his escape.
The most fantastic climax occurred when one of the
Australian nurses. Miss Vivian Bullwinkle, staggered into
Muntok Prison with Kingsley, the missing stretcher case.
Miss Bullwinkle was a tall, slender girl in her twenties with
light brown hair and grey eyes.
Testifying at a War Crimes trial in Tokyo in 1946 she
said that after slaying Eric’s group the Japanese soldiers re-
turned from the cove polishing their bayonets. Standing in
front of the nurses they unhurriedly continued the job until
rifles and bayonets were scrupulously clean. Then they
ordered the nurses and a civilian woman (Mrs. Buridge) to
line up at the water’s edge and walk into the sea. Shots
sounded.
“I saw the girls fall one after the other,” said Nurse Bull-
winkle, “then I was hit.”
She fell into the water but did not lose consciousness.
Like Eric she played possum, pretending death but manag-
ing to breathe as the waves washed her back onto the beach.
When she was sure the Japanese had gone, she testified, “I
sat up and looked around. Then I took myself up into the
jungle and became unconscious.”
When she awakened and returned to the beach she
found she was the only survivor of the women. Kingsley
was alive and she managed to get him into the jungle; then
she foraged for food. Wives of native fishermen supplied
her food for about ten days, until Kingsley became strong
enough to walk with assistance and they hiked to Muntok.
The effort was too much for the soldier, however, and he
died in jail within a few days.
Miss Bullwinkle said the bullet which felled her entered
her back at about waist level and passed straight through.
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Like Eric’s bayonet thrust it missed vital organs and the
wound healed rapidly.
Doctors could hardly believe the facts to which Eric’s
wounds were testimony. They concluded the bayonet must
have slid between lung and liver without seriously damag-
ing either. They attributed the absence of infection to the
thoroughness with which the Japanese cleaned their bayo-
nets. Eric’s explanation was simpler. He said, “The Lord
was with me.”
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Out of the Bangka Straits
T he most envied people in Singapore Just before
that shattered colony surrendered to Japan were
the lucky persons permitted to get away. Their
less fortunate fellow colonials could only wait for the Japa-
nese to enter and intern them. But all the lucky ones were
not so lucky after all. Approximately 3,000 are estimated to
have perished under the guns of a Japanese task force in or
near the Bangka Straits. The Vyner-Brooke, with Eric Ger-
mann and the Australian nurses aboard, was only one of
approximately forty vessels sunk and another twenty cap-
tured.
* * * *
The Giang Bee found herself being circled by Japanese
destrovers near the mouth of the Straits. She hove to and
j
signalled that aboard her were women and children and
that, if spared, she would proceed under orders. The Japa-
nese appeared willing. A small boat put out from a de-
stroyer. It had covered a quarter of the distance when two
Dutch bombing planes appeared, attacked but missed the
destroyer. The small boat turned back.
Soon came signals from the destroyer giving Giang Bee
passengers thirty minutes to abandon ship. If they did, for
nearly half of them it would be as swimmers because there
were not enough lifeboats. Robert H. Scott, Chief of the
Far Eastern section of the British Ministry of Information,
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whose last job in Singapore had been to get war correspond-
ents safely out of the city, and Lieutenant E. P. C. Langdon
volunteered as emissaries to plead with the Japanese. A
dinghy just large enough for two men was lowered over the
side and Scott and Langdon rowed as hard and as fast as
they could row for the destroyer. The sun had set. Soon it
would be dark.
Aboard the Giang Bee, lifeboats were being prepared for
lowering. Jimmy Martin, a tough little Australian jockey,
was working on one of them. Nearby was an injured man
and his wife and their two blond children, aged four and
six. The man had been carried aboard with two broken
legs. Now he was doomed. Lifeboats were only for women
and children and a skeleton crew to row. Jimmy heard the
wife ask two men who were standing by idle to help her
move her husband into a more comfortable position.
“If you’ll give us a kiss, sister, we’ll move him,” one of
the men replied.
“I’ll do anything for my husband,” she said, and kissed
them as her husband watched, helpless.
Just then a warning shot was fired by the destroyer.
“Abandon ship!”
Women were ordered into lifeboats.
“Hand me the children,” Martin said.
“No,” said the woman. “If my husband can’t go, none of
us will.”
She removed her own life belt, then the life belts of the
children. When Jimmy last saw her she was sitting on the
deck, one arm around her husband’s shoulders, the other
around her children.
Jimmy and his helpers loaded one lifeboat and started to
lower it. A davit rope broke and the stern end dropped,
spilling its cargo into the sea.
“I thought the most terrible sounds possible were from
horses being burned to death,” Jimmy told me in Palem-
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bang Jail, “but the cries of those women and kids when the
davit rope broke were worse.”
Scott and Langdon were halfway to the destroyer when
it opened fire. Twenty minutes later the Giang Bee sank.
They changed course to avoid the destroyer and rowed
slowly, debating whether to pull toward Sumatra or Bangka
Island. A voice hailed them from the darkness and a hand
grasped the gunwale. They pulled in W. Probyn Allen’s
240 pounds. A few minutes later they hauled another man
from the dark water. When they got him into the dinghy
Scott said to Langdon,
“One of us had better get out and walk. Another half
inch and the gunwales will be under water.”
They all laughed. The latest passenger was a rubber
planter from Malaya named H. P. Kendall. He was bigger
than Allen; not as broad but taller, around six feet two with
a barrel chest and huge stomach. Scott and Langdon were
good sized men themselves.
Together they debated the wisest landfall. They suspected
Bangka was already captured but Sumatra might still be
free. Scott knew the approximate direction of the mouth
of the Moesi river, up which lay Palembang.
“Let’s try for the Moesi,” he said.
Two days later they grounded the dinghy at a Malay fish-
ing village on the Moesi shore. Villagers gave them water
and food and shelter for several days but declined to keep
them longer, fearing reprisals from the Japanese who mean-
while had captured Palembang and were masters of southern
Sumatra. Surrender was their only course. Barefooted they
hiked to Palembang. Scott, Kendall and Allen were put in
Palembang Jail and Langdon in one of the Military camps.
In another part of the Straits a heavily loaded lifeboat
pulled laboriously for Bangka Island. Clinging to its sides
and stern were eight men for whom there was no room in-
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side. Their ship had been sunk in the afternoon. The cling-
ing men grew weaker as the hours dragged. They discussed
with the lifeboat’s skipper their chances of being allowed
inside the boat.
“Not a chance,” said the skipper. “Under no circum-
stances can any more enter.”
“Then there’s no use hanging on longer,” said one of the
men, “Cheerio.”
He relinquished his hold and vanished. Three others fol-
lowed suit, with a “cheerio” bidding those in the boat
goodbye. By morning only one of the eight still hung on.
He was H. E. M. Mason, a 63-year-old rubber planter.
“I’m too stubborn to die,” he quipped. “You can’t get
rid of me.”
When the boat reached shore he waded up the beach
under his own power, stretched out on the sand and slept.
The 6oo-ton Li Wo, coastal steamer of the China traders
Jardine & Matheson, found itself in the middle of the
Sumatra-bound Japanese invasion convoy. Aboard the Li
Wo were 120 men, mostly sailors from the British battle-
ship Prince of Wales, which with the Repulse had been
sunk off the Malayan coast. R. L. McCann, an Australian tin
miner, was one of the few civilian passengers. He told me
that the Li Wo’s skipper, Captain Tom Wilkinson, didn’t
waste a second debating his predicament.
“We’ll go down fighting,” Wilkinson declared, “and
we’ll take one of those Japs with us.”
The Li Wo had a submarine gun forward and thirteen
shells. Captain Wilkinson picked out a small transport for
his target and, ordering full steam ahead, charged the trans-
port. Whether Wilkinson’s audacity took the Japanese
completely by surprise or whether they simply failed to spot
the Li Wo in time, McCann did not know. But the little
vessel managed to shoot all thirteen of its shells— setting the
v/arship afire— and then ram the transport.
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The impact stove in the transport but did not hole the
Li Wo below the water line. Not yet mortally damaged
and her engines running, she could still fight. Wilkinson
ordered full speed astern.
The Li Wo backed off. She surged forward for another
ramming attack but by that time a Japanese cruiser had its
guns on her and blew the Li Wo out of the water.
McCann was one of thirteen survivors.
Lieutenant Colonel Lang of the Australian Signal Corps
had just lain down to sleep for the first time in forty-eight
hours — because he thought his military launch had safely
run the Bangka gantlet— when shells blew the launch
apart. In the few hectic moments before the launch sank,
Lang noticed a patriotic young corporal seize the boat’s
ensign, wrap it around himself and jump.
Lang jumped also. He noticed the launch’s bathroom
door floating beside him and clung to it. He was still tired
so he decided to sleep in the water. He tied his feet to the
bathroom door, lay back in his life belt, and slept. When
he awakened, the door was supporting three other men, a
brigadier general, a cook and the young corporal still
wrapped in the ensign.
TTie hazy outline of a mountain peak indicated where
lay Bangka Island. They debated whether to stay with the
door in hopes of drifting ashore or to leave the door and
swim. The cook, a poor swimmer, chose the door. The gen-
eral, the corporal and Lang elected to swim. They bade
the cook adieu and struck out.
During the long afternoon Lang went blind from sun
glare on glass-smooth water. He followed his companions
by sound. The corporal began talking nonsense.
“I’m going upstairs for a drink,” he said.
“Better wait awhile,” said the general.
“No, it’s just upstairs.”
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Lang heard a gulp and the corporal ceased talking. After
a while he asked the general what happened.
“He went under,” said the general.
Night soothed Lang’s eyes. Sight returned and he could
see the Bangka lighthouse flashing ahead. When the sun
rose next morning, he and the general still were paddling
in their life belts. The sun rose higher, scorching their
heads unmercifully. Lang’s eyesight again blanked out. The
general began talking nonsense.
“They should have served lunch before we left the ship,”
Lang heard him say. “We’ll see they do it next time.”
He jabbered for a long time, then said,
“I’m going upstairs for a drink.”
Lang heard him gulp and guessed he was drinking sea
water. He heard him choke, gurgle, and thrash his arms
spasmodically. Then silence. Lang could feel the general
was slumped forward in his life belt, his face in the water.
He remembered the general had a clasp knife in his
trousers’ pocket, because he had used it to cut the water-
swollen knots of the rope which bound his feet to the raft.
The knife would be valuable ashore. With one hand Lang
held the general’s collar while with the other he searched
for and found the knife. Then he let go of the collar. Now
he was alone and blind.
He became aware that his own mind was beginning to
wander, that his thoughts were fuzzy. He knew something
was wrong because every once in a while his brain would
wake up and tell him it had been dreaming. He had a
strong feeling that he need not swim any more because he
might be swimming in the wrong direction; that if he only
rested and took a drink everything would be all right. But
some inner compulsion kept him from drinking and some
inner strength kept him paddling. Night came again and
with it vision and the Bangka lighthouse. It flashed and
flashed and flashed until he became irritated and wished it
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would stop. Then he was aware that he could see the light-
house itself, and the reason he could see it was because the
sky was lightening on another dawn.
Something bumped one knee, then his other knee. He
put his hands down into mud. He crawled forward into a
mangrove swamp and kept crawling and splashing through
the swamp until he was on dry land. His next knowledge
was that he was in a hut being given water by a Chinese
man.
Lang told me his experience when we met in Charitas
Hospital.
Vivien Gordon Bowdon, 57-year-old Australian Trade
Commissioner to Singapore, had served his government in
Japan and knew the language, and also the diplomatic im-
munities to which he was entitled. When Japanese soldiers
in Muntok began stripping him and his companions of
their valuables he remonstrated, censuring the soldiers in
Japanese.
His companions, who told the story to me, did not under-
stand what he said but his words enraged the soldiers. They
marched him off, around a building and out of sight. After
a long interval shots were heard and the soldiers returned
without Bowdon. A Chinese resident of Muntok later man-
aged to talk to Bowdon’s friends and tell them what had
happened.
He said he was looking from a window of the building
behind which Bowdon was shot. He said Bowdon had been
forced to dig his own grave. As the soldiers held rifles on
him he used his hands and a board to scoop a shallow
trench in the sandy soil. Nearby grew some flowers. Bow-
don was ordered to pick a handful, then stand in the grave.
While he stood holding the flowers, he was shot.
The S. S. Mata Hart, which had followed the Vyner-
Brooke out of Singapore, docked at Muntok without a
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scratch. The Japanese had allowed her to surrender and
destroyers escorted her into the harbor. That was fortunate,
not only for her 400-odd passengers but for other hundreds
who were interned in South Sumatra for the war’s duration,
because aboard the Mata Hari were two doctors and a
small trunk full of medical supplies. The doctors were
West and J. G. Reed, who also had been on active duty in
Malaya.
Tire Mata Hari’s passengers, plus another estimated 400-
odd bedraggled men, women, and children who came out
of the Bangka Straits, were jammed into old Muntok Prison
and an adjoining building which, prior to the war, had
been used as a quarantine depot for coolie labor in the
island’s tin dredging operations. The depot was a U-shaped,
concrete building divided into long, narrow rooms contain-
ing cement sleeping benches.
The prison next door had been built originally for life
term prisoners but when a newer penitentiary was con-
structed on another island, the Muntok structure had been
turned into a pepper warehouse.
Bangka Straits survivors slept on top of pepper sacks in
one half of the prison, while the other half was occupied
by 600 Chinese coolies in the last stages of starvation and
disease. The coolies were labor conscripts, swept off the
streets of Hongkong after that city’s capture, herded aboard
ship and into the holds. They were kept under hatches for
six weeks during the trip south, then dumped off at Mun-
tok to work on the airfield. But most of them were too far
gone to work. They could only die. And die they did, every
day, lying in their own filth, filling the jail with a stench
that was a blow in the face to newcomers. Since not enough
coolies were fit for work, the shipwrecked white prisoners
took their places, marching each dawn to the airdrome,
where they labored under the muzzles of machine guns,
and marching back each night.
Doctors Reed and West set up a makeshift hospital in
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the quarantine depot which went by the name of the dredg-
ing company that owned it— Bangka Tin Winning. One
patient was a Royal Air Force lieutenant with two shattered
feet needing amputation. West and Reed pleaded in vain
that he be sent to a Japanese field hospital for the amputa-
tion that would save his life. Finally, they decided to operate
themselves. The trunk of medical supplies contained no
anesthetic except morphine and little in the way of surgi-
cal instruments. They had no saw. A 6o-year-old refugee
named W. R. Roberts made a saw from a barrel hoop. He
cut a section from the hoop, heated and straightened it,
then filed in the necessary teeth.
The lieutenant was tied onto the top of a wooden table
and kept under morphine while his feet were severed with
the barrel hoop saw. He recovered from the operation only
to die of dysentery.
Three Australians removed a wooden door from the Tin
Winning offices, cut it up and made a coffin for the lieu-
tenant. He was buried next to Kingsley, who had been
brought in by Nurse Bullwinkle, in the Dutch Cemetery
about a mile from the prison.
Conditions in Muntok Prison and the depot worsened as
time passed. The places were foul, swarming madhouses
of sick and hungry men, women, and children, and disease
ridden coolies who daily furnished fresh corpses for burial.
In the last week of March, 1942, the prisoners were
divided into groups. Women, children, the sick, and men
unfit for work were shipped to Palembang and interned
separately. Military prisoners, and Dr. Reed, were sent to
concentration camp. Civilian men, and Dr. West, were
put in Palembang Jail. Able-bodied civilians were sent to
the Shell refinery at Pladjoe, across the river from Palem-
bang, and put to work loading ships. Later, in April, they
joined us in the jail. That was when I met Eric.
Throughout my incarceration in Palembang, men shud
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dered when they spoke of Bangka Island and cursed at
mention of Muntok.
4c 4c 4c 101
Now, in September, 1943, our prison ship was docking
in Muntok harbor. Trucks waited at the jetty. Except for
drivers and soldiers, not another person was in sight. We
clambered into the vehicles with our luggage and they
lumbered through the deserted town. Windows and doors
were closed. The only inhabitants seemed to be soldiers
posted at each intersection along our route. Had the build-
ings been in ruins the town would have been almost as
empty as a ghost city through which I walked while cross-
ing the no-man's land between Occupied and Free China
during my escape from Shanghai.
The trucks stopped in front of a high stone wall sur-
mounted by barbed wire. In the middle of the wall was a
double gate of solid, iron-studded wood. In one side of the
gate was a grilled peephole. We looked at the wall and
the gate and our hearts stood still.
“Muntok Prison,” whispered Doc West. “It’s Muntok
Prison.”
The guard commander inserted a key into a ponderous
lock, turned it with both hands and pulled mightily. The
non-peephole side creaked open. He squeezed into the
opening so he could get his shoulder behind the gate from
the inside and push. Other guards then pulled and pushed
open the peephole side. Evidently no one lived now in
Muntok Prison.
Inside the gates of thick, heavy wood was a short corri-
dor, then two sets of barred iron gates. Guards clanged
them open and we walked through into an empty, barren
yard surrounded on three sides by vacant cell blocks. The
fourth side, toward the gate, was enclosed by two high
fences. The first fence was iron grill; the second barbed
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BY EASTERN WINDOWS
wire, curved inward at the top. It was Palembang Jail on
a larger, grimmer scale. The walls were higher, the cells
larger and the general surroundings worse. The sepulchral
stillness of the place, like a waiting grave, chilled us. Of all
the memories of my life that awful silence, utter and abso-
lute, is the strongest.
I had heard of Muntok Prison as a bedlam of moans and
screams and tears and milling humanity; of filth and dirt
and disease and corpses of Chinese coolies whose gangren-
ous limbs were rotting before they died. But there was
none of that now. Instead, Muntok Prison was uninhabited
and clean. A bomb-wrecked cell house had been repaired.
The barbed wire atop the wall was new and taut. Even
the gravelly yard had been neatly raked. It was as though
an old charnel house had been purged of corpses and
cleaned and swept especially for us. But the odor of decay
remained in the air, oppressive, frightening.
Wordlessly, because we were beyond words, we lined up
for counting. We had walked into a tomb and we knew
it. A feeling of death squeezed my vitals like a closing hand.
Bangka Island grew pepper and produced tin but no
food. A sentence read to me by Controleur De Raat from
a Dutch encyclopedia ran through my mind with the in-
tonations of a dirge:
“The Island of Bangka is known for its production of tin
and pepper and the high incidence of beri beri and cerebral
malaria. ...”
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McDougalVs Bedroom isr Morgue
D aylight faded during the counting— our
first roll call in Muntok Prison. Puzzled, I
looked up. The sky indicated that although
the sun was low it had not yet set. Dusk was coming early
to the jail yard because walls were high, cell blocks dark
and we did not have the vistas of Barracks Camp. Spectacu-
lar sunsets no longer would parade their grandeur. We
could not see them. Nor would flying foxes wing overhead
because on Bangka there was nothing for them to eat.
Counting finished, we bowed, guards saluted. They
pointed to a wing of cells bounding the yard’s east side.
Into the cells we went. They were large rooms of stone and
concrete; each, as we learned by later measurement, 45
feet long, 22 feet wide and 15 feet high. Even the Japanese
realized, however, the cells could not hold us all. They
decided the problem temporarily by decreeing each man
would have the space of one straw mat, about feet
long and slightly over two feet wide. Mats were placed
side by side and end to end without even walking aisles
between. I was so tired I slept almost immediately.
Guards turned a deaf ear next day to pleas that we be
allowed to spread out and occupy other empty cells— more
prisoners were coming. They arrived in groups as the
Japanese closed other small civilian internment camps in
south Sumatra and consolidated all internees in Muntok
Prison. We thought we had been crowded in Palembang
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but we had not known what real crowding was. There,
men at least had shelves to sleep on. Except for one cell
block there were no shelves in Muntok Prison. Men lay
on the floors with their belongings. By October 10th there
were 685 men inside a place built for a quarter of that
number. When everyone was settled we were able to re-
arrange our spaces so that there was at least a narrow aisle
beside each row of mats.
Despite crowding we were cheered for a few weeks by an
increase of rations, principally dried fish. But, when boats
ceased bringing more prisoners from Sumatra, they also
stopped bringing food.
Every inch of the prison was combed for nails, bits of
wood or metal. Direct Action Drysdale noticed a chicken
scratching persistently at a spot which had been a bomb
crater when he was there in 1942 and had been filled. He
dug where the chicken scratched and found a soldier’s
aluminum mess tin and some bits of metal which he made
into wrist watch bands and sold to the guards.
Commandant of Muntok Prison was a sad-faced little Jap-
anese civilian whom Doc nicknamed “Peanut.” He talked
and acted as though he was genuinely sorry for our predica-
ment and in many ways he did his best to help us. Peanut
blamed food shortages on the military who, he said, hogged
available supplies and would not cooperate with the Jap-
anese civilian administrators. He said we would be better
off if the military would take back control of internees.
Peanut was concerned at our mounting sick rate and
contrived to find extra food for hospital patients. The
Chinese contractor, who had been brought from Palem-
bang, said the little commandant himself scoured the
island for supplies. Peanut found papayas, eggs and small
amounts of unpolished red rice, more nourishing than
ordinary white polished rice. Seldom did he bring in more
than a few papayas or a dozen eggs at a time but what he
did bring helped sick men immeasurably.
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McDOUGALL’S BEDROOM & MORGUE 169
*
Peanut’s greatest contribution to prisoner morale was
news. We were starved for news, having been cut off from
the undercover newspaper and radio sources we had in
Palembang. Peanut filled the gap. He could speak and
write crude English and he issued written “communiques”
that were gems of backward sentences and twisted gram-
mar but the content was dear.
His usual procedure was to summon Doc West. While
Doc sat answering polite but vague medical questions,
Peanut would be writing a translation of a Japanese news-
paper or mimeographed army bulletin. Occasionally Doc
even procured one of the papers, to be deciphered by a
priest. Father P. H. van Gisbergen, who, from his knowl-
edge of Chinese and with the aid of a Japanese dictionary,
made rough translations. Thus we learned American forces
were suffering colossal defeats on various Pacific islands;
but each defeat apparently resulted in their gaining posses-
sion of the island.
We wondered what would be Peanut’s fate if his superi-
ors discovered he was relaying us war news.
Flowers for funerals were another of Peanut’s innova-
tions. And he kept the coffin supply abreast of demand.
Since a body had to be carried outside in a box and we were
without cold storage facilities in a tropic climate, it was
important that a coffin be available not too long after
death. Therefore, when a man was dying the guards were
notified so a box could be ordered from the Chinese coffin
maker who nailed together wooden planks supplied by the
Japanese. The working party, whose job it was to carry in
the boxes, also sometimes arranged with the coffin maker—
for a substantial bribe and large profit for himself— to put
food inside an incoming coffin. That was one black market
source. Peanut not only saw that the coffin supply was
adequate but with each furnished a huge wreath of brilliant
flowers— yellow frangipani and alamanda, purple bougain-
villea, red hibiscus, blue and white passion blossoms, crim-
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son four o’clocks. He attended all funerals, standing with
bared head during services.
Doc West told him that if he rustled more food instead
of flowers we would need fewer coffins. Peanut replied that
he was very, very sorry, but his superiors would not allow
more food; therefore he bought the flowers with his own
money. He was such a nice little guy we believed him.
Peanut's communiques relating Allied successes touched
off a flurry of betting as to when the war would end. An
Englishman named M. L. Phillips, known in Malaya for
his stable of race horses and gambling luck, offered to
wager 25,000 guilders or its equivalent in Straits dollars—
payable after the war— that we would be free by January 1,
1944. He had no takers because no individual would bet
that kind of money and Phillips refused to wager against
a pool. However, his offer engendered such gambling
optimism that bettors in the five and ten guilder class
raised their antes to fifty and one hundred guilders. Con-
troleur De Raat believed the war would end by November
1, 1944, and bet me fifty guilders to that effect. I picked
June 1, 1945 as my date and bet twenty-five guilders we
would not be free until then. A half dozen listeners jumped
at the wager and such a heated argument developed over
who got first crack at the bet that it ended by no one's
taking it.
We had to depend entirely on our own hospital facilities.
There was no Charitas in Muntok to take our critically
sick or send us medicines. Our hospital was assembled in a
group of storerooms and solitary confinement cells along
the south wall and was separated from the rest of the
prison by a barred iron fence. I spent all my time in the
hospital dressing major skin cases. Out-patients were
treated in the clinic on the other side of the fence inside
the prison yard proper, because it was easier of access.
Three more doctors came with the new prisoners: Holl-
weg, who had been released by the Kempeitai after months
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McDOUGALL'S BEDROOM & MORGUE 171
of solitary confinement; and two other Hollanders, A. P. A.
Boerma and Willem von Woerkom. Hollweg took charge
of the clinic, assisted by Allen and two other dressers;
Boerma and Woerkom divided the cell blocks between
them and treated in their cells men who were too sick to
walk to the clinic but not sick enough to be considered
major cases eligible for the precious space in our hospital.
When Dr. Hollweg returned to us in Muntok Prison
he found that our hospital had grown from a two cell
affair with a staff of four, as it had been in Palembang }ail,
to a major institution with a staff of forty. He may have
resented, despite the fact it was the Camp Committee's
request, that Dr. West continued as head of the hospital.
Dr. Hollweg’s attitude toward Dr. West and his staff
became distinctly cool. No longer was he the raconteur
who entertained us with tall stories, as of old. Instead, he
seldom spoke to us except on medical matters.
At one end of the hospital, next door to a crude one-
holer which served us, was a cubicle containing a miniature,
unused bath tank. We were so cramped for space that
when Doc suggested I convert the cubicle into a private
bedroom by covering the tank and sleeping on top of it,
I gladly acquiesced. Next to food and news, privacy was
the most precious commodity in jail. The tank top, covered,
was just wide enough and long enough to sleep on. Between
the tank and the door was room for my jail-made chair of
wood and rice sacking. I could study— shorthand and
Malay— and read in solitude.
Weeks passed. Doc had another idea. A dying man was
entitled to privacy if he could get it. There should be
some place he could lie besides shoulder to shoulder with
other patients. Sometimes men groaned in coma for days
before death came, and that was hard on other patients.
We agreed that when a man was on his final lap of life
he could die in my bedroom. I would sleep elsewhere until
it was possible to move back.
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I changed places with dying patients so frequently that
in time my sleeping quarters became known as “McDou-
gall's Bedroom & Morgue.” Its reputation was so notorious
that we put patients in there only if unconscious or too
far gone to care. Only one other man besides myself slept
in the room and left under his own power. He was a patient
who fooled us by recovering.
Near my “Bedroom & Morgue” was a windowless solitary
confinement cell we used as a storeroom. There it was we
performed a secret autopsy. A man died after an illness
that for a time baffled doctors who differed among them-
selves as to whether or not it was an intestinal obstruction.
West and Boerma believed it was an obstruction and that
only an operation would save the patient. Hollweg be-
lieved the cause was something else.
On the other side of Bangka Island, at Pangkal Pinang,
was a Japanese hospital. Military authorities refused to
allow the patient to be taken there. When he died the
doctors decided to perform a post mortem examination,
both to settle their own dispute and for the sake of other
men who might become similarly ill. The autopsy had to
be secret, not only from guards who might interfere but
also from fellow prisoners. The fewer who knew the better.
Resident Oranje gave permission.
We did not notify the Japanese of the death until too
late for burial that day. We carried the body into the store-
room for encoffining but, instead of nailing down the lid
after the guards had viewed the corpse and were satis-
fied the man was dead, we merely pounded to make a
noise.
Handy men of the hospital staff were G. P. Harrison,
assistant chief engineer of the Malayan Railways and R. E.
Earle, Chief Electrical Engineer of the Singapore Harbor
board. From barbed wire they fashioned retractors to hold
open the abdominal incision. From the key opener to a
sardine tin they made a surgical needle. And by unraveling
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McDOUGALL’S BEDROOM & MORGUE 173
a piece of canvas they made '‘surgical thread/’ to sew up
the incision.
After the inside guard made his half hourly round at
3:30 A.M. Harrison, Earle, West, Boerma and I met in the
storeroom, sealed the door behind us with a tarpaulin and
blankets and went to work. Earle sat outside to watch for
light leaks. The light was from an oil lamp and flashlight
the Japanese allowed us for hospital use.
We removed the coffin lid and laid it down gently. The
dead man had been a big fellow. He had gone in without
difficulty when his corpse was still warm and pliable but
now rigor mortis had wedged his wide shoulders against
the sides of the narrow box.
"Tip the coffin on its side and pry him out,” West sug-
gested in a whisper.
Harrison vetoed that as "too apt to make a noise.”
"We can do it with team work,” Harrison said. "Each
of us get a hand hold somewhere on the same side, under-
neath him, and pull up when I count three.”
We each squeezed one hand under him and put the
other on the coffin edge for leverage.
"One, Two, Three!”
Up came the left shoulder. We laid the body on the
cement floor and the autopsy began. Boerma’s scalpel
sliced into cold flesh and moved downward, Harrison and
I crouched on opposite sides of the body, holding open the
incision with our crude retractors. West held the flashlight.
The flickering oil lamp, on the floor at the foot of the
corpse, threw our shadows on walls and ceiling in monstrous
caricature. Since ventilation was cut off by the blocked
doorway, air in the concrete chamber became oppressive.
The doctors consulted in occasional whispers. For long
intervals the only sounds were those heard solely in these
certain and peculiar circumstances: the faint tearing of
parting flesh; tiny protesting suctions of viscera pulled from
lifelong habitations.
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At last they found it. The fatal adhesion two doctors
believed must be there and the third had doubted. While
probing in the cavity they explained to Harrison and me in
whispers what had happened. They held up the affected
organs and showed us how death had come about and how
it might have been prevented had operational facilities
been available. They decided that no matter how desperate
a gamble an emergency operation might be in our circum-
stances it would be the only possibility should such a case
occur again.
They replaced the entrails, pulled the incision together
with large stitches and we lifted the body back into the
coffin and pushed the shoulders down. The doctors left.
Harrison and I washed the floor and waited for morning
roll call. When it rang, filling the yard with clangor, we
nailed shut the coffin.
After roll call I moved back into “McDougall's Bedroom
& Morgue” and lay down for a short rest before beginning
daily hospital rounds.
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15
Malaria
k PREMONITORY chill, like a cold wind, passed
l\ through me and was gone during church serv-
X ices Sunday morning December 12, 1943. My
eyes were acting strangely, my teeth were on edge and I
felt light headed. A second chill prickled my flesh into
goose pimples. Five minutes later a third came, then a
fourth. By the time Mass ended I was shaking uncon-
trollably. I walked back to the hospital and asked Dish-
washer Banks if he could find me an extra blanket. He
brought his own and threw it over me where I lay in my
Bedroom & Morgue, shivering as though I had stepped
from a Turkish bath into a refrigerator.
Cold was welling inside my guts like an icy fountain,
and soon diluted the warmth of a hot drink Banks also
brought. The chills ran in cycles of intensity. First would
come a warning flutter, a trembling that would rise swiftly
to a crescendo of bone-rattling paroxysms. Then would fol-
low a period of uneasy quiescence while I waited for the
next one. The intervals between spasms grew shorter and
their violence greater. They began in the very center of me,
in my stomach where something tensed and writhed, send-
ing tremors outward and setting up muscular vibrations
which spread in ever widening circles until even my fingers
and toes twitched and my teeth became chattering casta-
nets. Shudders ran along nerve and sinew and bone in con-
175
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tinuous waves, cold and hot by turns and accompanied by
thirst and nausea.
There was a grand climax of convulsion, then gradually
the trembling decreased as if its own violence had generated
heat to melt the chills. Before the last fluttering died I
glowed from an inner fire, a steadily burning dry fever that
mounted during morning and afternoon, turning my head
into one throbbing pain which crowded vision from my
eyes. The room swam in a hot mist.
An indescribable depression obsessed me, filled me with
forebodings. Dreams which were not really dreams, nor
yet hallucinations, but formless terrors of the mind, stalked
my room, settled shapelessly beside me on the bed. I was
conscious, aware that the indefinable things which troubled
me were imaginary, but that knowledge was no comfort.
Rather, it whispered of insanity.
I thought of a husky young Dutch engineer who had died
several weeks before from a sudden and undiagnosed fever.
He had walked into the hospital complaining,
“Something is wrong with my head."
He had a temperature of 39 Centigrade (102 Fahren-
heit). During the fourteen hours before he died his tem-
perature rose to 41.8 C. (107.2 F.) Doc listed the cause
of his death as “pyrexia of unknown origin." The phrase
ran through my mind as I lay awake, fuzzy-brained and
burning. Did I have the same thing? What was it? The
sentence from De Raat’s encyclopedia flashed like a neon
sign:
“The island of Bangka is known for its production of tin
and pepper and the high incidence of beri-beri and cerebral
malaria."
Cerebral malaria was the deadliest kind.
“If it doesn't kill you," Hollweg once said, “it often
leaves you silly in the head. Better die than have your brain
burned out."
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177
His words danced through my mind in a silly song to
the tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush!”
“Better to have your brain burned out, brain burned out,
brain burned out. Better to have your brain burned out so
early in the morning.”
Sleep must have interrupted the song because suddenly I
was awake, clear minded and clammy with sweat. The
fever was gone, replaced by rivers of sweat and tons of
soggy blankets. The headache was gone too. It was night.
Clarity of thought brought increasing sensitivity to the cold
stickiness of my surroundings. I began to shiver.
“No more of that stuff,” I said to myself, “I’m getting
up and get dry and warm.”
My bed on top of the tank was four feet off the floor.
I slid from the tank. My feet touched concrete but there
was nothing between feet and hips. My knees folded like
jackknives and I sat down. Nor could I rise. I remained sit-
ting leaning against the tank, until old Kendall who had
replaced Prior as ward matron, came clumping by on one
of his hourly trips. He lifted me back into bed.
Sleep refused to conquer my restlessness and cold. When
daylight came I tried again to get up and walk. Success.
Shakily I made my way outside into the sun and sat down.
Doc West came along.
“Get back in bed,” he said. “Sun’s not good for you.”
I attempted to rise and could not. My knees were un-
hinged. He helped me back to my feet and boosted me
into bed. Immediately shivering began. Harrison appeared
with a hot drink. Fever replaced the chills. Dreams came
that were not dreams because I was awake, and not hallu-
cinations because I saw nothing; nevertheless, they were
real and unnerving.
Talking was relief so I talked aloud, to myself. Fre-
quently the words I heard had no connection with what I
thought I was saying. Talking was an escape valve for the
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pressure inside me. The pressure made me want to get up
and run, anywhere just to be running, away from the walls
of the room which were closing in, away from the hard mat
which galled my hips and shoulders, away from dully
aching bones. If I could run I could leave the pressure
behind. But my legs wouldn’t run. If the pressure got any
higher it would blow a little hole in the top of my
skull and escape with a whistle. I didn’t want to be a
whistle. I managed to sit up and immediately began to
fly.
Arms seized me, pushed me back to the mat.
“Hey,” said a voice, “you nearly fell out of bed.”
My eyes focussed on a face.
“Boswell,” I said. “Norman Boswell.”
“Yes,” said the face. “Doctor West said you wanted to
talk to someone.”
So I began talking about Shanghai restaurants, describ-
ing in detail every place I had eaten there and many which
were purely imaginary.
“You don’t mind if they’re imaginary, do you?” I asked
Boswell.
He did not reply. I looked carefully where he had been
sitting. He was not there. Instead, West and Engineer
Harrison were looking down at me. I tried in vain to tell
them what strange thoughts were ballooning in my mind
but my tongue wouldn’t cooperate. It spoke not what my
brain ordered but only words without meaning. Frantically
I tried to tell Doc I wasn’t delirious, that it was just my
tongue not working. But the words that came only made
him laugh and tell me to go to sleep.
Not only would my tongue refuse to obey, my brain
also played tricks.
A thought would flash into consciousness, then as sud-
denly vanish, leaving the impression it had been a good
thought but no recollection of its substance.
It was like fighting drowsiness when driving an automo-
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179
bile. The mind goes blank for split second intervals until
fear rings an alarm and you see the road again. You're
scared stiff you’ll doze off and smash up; but you can’t
stop driving. Rationality came like that, in sudden spurts,
with knowledge there were blank or delirious spaces be-
tween.
I was helplessly and miserably aware of the addled state
of my mind and tongue. I have distinct and vivid recollec-
tions of the episodes described here. They occurred during
the first forty-eight hours of the fever. After that. Doc later
told me, my conversation was limited to two endlessly re-
peated words: “Skip it.”
There are a few more shadowy memories of peering
through a mosquito net and saying “hello” to silent figures
sitting beside the bed. Eric was there, and Father Elling
and Father van Gisbergen, the translator, and Father Bak-
ker. Next is a dim memory of being carried in someone’s
arms. After that was the awakening.
I was lying in a bed not my own and in a room not my
own. Father Filing’s face was just above mine but his voice
came from a distance. He was saying,
“Merry Christmas!”
Again I awakened. It was night. A light was burning
nearby. A ward attendant named Koopal was shaking me.
He put his lips close to my ear and asked,
“Do you want to hear the choir?”
“Why?” I wondered aloud.
“Christmas Eve concert,” he said.
Yes, I wanted to hear it, but I could hear nothing. Won-
dering what Koopal was up to I fell asleep.
When I awakened again it was day. Visitors were in the
ward, shaking hands with patients. But no sounds came
from their moving lips. All I could hear were bells. Thev
rang so long and steadily I realized, finally, they were not
bells. The ringing was in my own ears.
I tried to sit up. Someone noticed my efforts and propped
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me up with a board behind my back. Doc West strode up,
grinning.
“Fm deaf,” I told him.
He leaned down and shouted.
“Quinine!”
That also explained the shuddering bitterness of my
mouth. Harrison appeared with a cup of something to
drink. He spoke into my ear.
“Have a Harrison eggnog.”
I drank. It did taste like eggnog. I started to ask “how
come eggnog?” but the effort to speak was tiring. I dozed
off. Next day Koopal brought a bowl of rice gruel in which
had been broken a soft boiled egg. Talking was easier. I
asked about the egg.
“From Peanut,” said Koopal. “Christmas present.”
Doc was there again, grinning as usual.
“You can have an egg every day as long as there are any.
And here’s something else.”
He put a spoonful of Australian tinned butter in the
gruel. Where he got it I didn’t know. He made light of
thanks.
“Skip it,” he said. “We’re trying to get you back on your
feet. You can have a spoonful every day, while it lasts.”
Other friends brought me extra bits of food. Eric and
Canadian Christie procured a coconut and made a pudding
of shredded coconut meat and rice. Mike Treurniet, one of
the clinic dressers, owned a duck. He killed it and made
broth. Harrison and Kendall gave me slices of papaya,
secured through the Chinese contractor. Gradually my ears
stopped ringing, my strength returned.
On New Year’s Day Mike Treurniet gave me a genuine
American cigaret. He had brought a tin of cigarets into
internment and saved it to open for some celebration.
Often we had solemnly but indecisively discussed what the
occasion would be.
“Where’s your will power, Mike?” I asked when he
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handed me the cigaret. “Couldn't you wait for the big
day?”
“We’re celebrating you,” he said. “Last week we thought
you might not be around for New Year’s.”
“Nuts,” I said, and breathed the first ceremonial puff.
“Anyway, here’s to 1944!”
I blew out a lungful of smoke.
“Happy New Year,” said Mike.
Deeply I inhaled again, right down to the innermost
crevices. What blissful pleasure to blow out American
smoke and watch it float away, mingling with the thin
spiral from the cigaret end.
Then came payment time— the reaction of giddiness and
a pounding heart.
“Hey,” said Mike. “You better not smoke any more.”
An itch followed the fever, making sleep impossible. The
night of January 3rd the itching felt as if a host of little
worms with red hot bellies was wriggling on my chest. I
rolled and tossed and scratched. The tormentors only
spread out, creeping over my stomach and down my legs.
I pulled the hair of my head as a counter irritant.
From the Bedroom & Morgue, from which I had been
moved to make room for a dying man, sounded long drawn
moans and occasional cries. Each outgoing breath was an
exhalation of woe. Whether he was conscious or uncon-
scious I knew not; or if conscious, whether his moans were
from pain, loneliness or despair. Hour after hour the
groans continued. Somewhere outside the jail a dog began
to howl. The dog’s howling and the man’s cries blended in
a harrowing harmony. Together with the itch they made
my bed unbearable. I got up and managed to totter out of
the ward. The night attendant grabbed me.
“What in hell are you doing out of bed?”
“The itch,” I said. “Got to have fresh air.”
The attendant eased me into a wicker lounge chair that
was used daytimes by a paralytic.
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“Want a smoke?" asked the night man.
“Sure, got one?"
“A real one, too."
“From Mike?"
“No. Guess after you taste it."
He walked to the oil lamp in the ward, lit the cigaret
and, returning, handed it to me. Already I had caught the
odor and knew whence it came.
“Smells like Tokyo."
“Right. The guard gave me a couple. New Year’s pres-
ent. He said New Year’s was the Japanese hari rayah. Did
you know that?"
Hari Rayah is the Malay term for a Big Holiday.
’Yes," I said. “I knew it."
Because New Year’s Day is sacred to the Japanese— the
biggest day of their year— my escape from Shanghai had
been facilitated.
On New Year’s morning, 1942 , 1 was lying in the bottom
of a sampan in a canal west of Shanghai. Further progress
along the canal was barred by an iron gate which let down
into the water from a railroad bridge above. On either side
of the canal lay a heavily garrisoned village. Japanese and
Chinese puppet guards were on the bridge. A Chinese offi-
cial in the puppet Nanking regime was scheduled to appear
at the bridge at 9 a.m. and pay New Year’s Day compli-
ments to the Japanese garrison commander and his troops.
The Chinese was scheduled to do it because he was secretly
a Chungking man and the guerrillas who were smuggling
us out of Occupied China had so arranged with him.
In the sampan with me were my fellow correspondents,
Robert “Pepper" Martin and Francis Lee, and several
guerrillas.
Promptly at 9 a.m. the Chinese official appeared with his
retinue at the bridge. The Japanese guards retired to a
nearby tea house to drink a toast, in saki, to their Emperor.
When their ringing Banzais sounded, bribed puppet guards
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on the bridge raised the iron gate, our sampan shot through
and the gate dropped down behind us. Sixty-six hours later,
about 3 A.M. January 4, 1942, we crossed the last barrier—
the Nanking-Hangchow highway— and stepped into Free
China.
Now it was about 3 a.m. January 4, 1944. I took the
last drag from the cigaret and asked the attendant where he
had been New Year’s Day, 1942.
“Right here in Sumatra, working in the oil fields.”
My ears were clear enough by now to hear little sounds—
the scuffle of boots in the nearby guardroom, the rattle of
wire as rats scampered, like tight rope walkers, along the
top of the fourteen foot fence which separated the hospital
from the jail yard. Once Doc West and I shook the fence,
unbalancing a rat. It fell with a plop to the cement and
lay there stunned. We were too surprised by our success
to kill it before the rat recovered itself and scampered away.
In Palembang Jail one morning Allen and I awakened to
see a rat crouched, perfectly still, with its nose just touching
the edge of the hole where it lived. At first we thought the
rat was mad, then we realized it was dead.
“Heart failure,” said Allen, “right on his own doorstep.”
Toward morning the dying man’s groans faded to a death
rattle. When the rattle ceased the attendant investigated.
Returning, he said,
“He’s gone.”
I wondered aloud how long it would take to get a
coffin.
“We have one already,” said the attendant. “The one we
ordered for you.”
He wasn’t kidding either. A little chill settled in my
stomach.
Weeks later I asked Father Filing if it were true I had
been that close to death. I had been. Two days before
Christmas he had kept vigil at my bedside, hoping I would
recover consciousness long enough to receive the Last Sacra-
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ments. Having nothing else to do while waiting, he had
composed part of a sermon for delivery at my funeral which
he thought would be Christmas Day.
Unlike the young engineer who had died too suddenly
to establish a malarial pattern, my illness ran a sufficient
course, from December 12th to 26th, with the climax on
the 23rd, when, instead of killing me, the fever unexpectedly
broke. Luckily for me Doc West had a small supply of
quinine. Palembang had been a malaria free area and I
was the first of the Bangka cases. Consequently his slender
stocks of quinine had not all been used. Luckier still, he
had found, by accident on the 22nd, some pills of an
unusual variety of quinine which my system absorbed more
readily than the ordinary kind. The new pills tipped the
balance in my favor.
In all the long, terrible months ahead of us in Muntok
Prison, no other man survived cerebral malaria.
By January 1 5th I was able to walk as far as the kitchen
where were some scales. I weighed 46^^ kilograms (102.3
pounds). Just what I had weighed as a schoolboy in the
ninth grade. I remembered the figure well because the day
I weighed it had been a big one in my school life. The
scales then proved I was over 100 pounds and could prac-
tice for the football team.
Doc laughed when I told him.
“You'll soon be casting a shadow,” he said. “Two weeks
ago ril bet you didn’t weigh ninety.”
That night I lay awake thinking of my good luck in
surviving and contrasting my two trips in two years down
into the valley of the shadow of death. The first trip had
been in the Indian Oeean after my ship sank. Then I had
been keenly aware of my predieament and for nearly an
entire afternoon had swum and thought and prayed. But
on this seeond trip I had not even been aware of the dan-
ger until it was over. How blindly and in ignoranee of his
peril can a man slip out of lifel
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How Men Starve
M alnutrition is like age. it creeps up on
a man but not without warning because an
empty belly is its own perpetual alarm. For
just as a man awakens in the morning and his joints tell
him he is getting old, so the hungry man awakens and
swollen limbs tell him he is starving to death.
Like cold, hunger numbs the body and the mind. No
matter how vividly hunger is described it can not be under-
stood until it has been felt. I thought I knew something
about hunger after seeing so much of it in China. I thought
I knew it intimately in prison where men were dying around
me and I nursed them as my own stomach crawled with
the ache for food. But I didn't really know about hunger
until I awakened one morning to find my own feet swollen.
'Fhen I knew.
Unless you who read this get that way you won’t know
either. So there is little use trying to describe how hunger
feels. All I can do is tell what we who were starving
did.
Whether hunger changes a man’s essential character is
debatable. I think it does not. Others differ. They say, for
example, that hunger makes thieves of men who otherwise
would never dream of theft. I say that they were already
thieves at heart and hunger only brought it out. The man
who would steal from a starving neighbor was dishonest
about lesser things in normal life. Men of stronger con-
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science would die before stealing from a hungry fellow
prisoner.
Hunger throws into bold relief a man’s true self. It strips
away the false front behind which hypocrites masquerade.
From others it removes the mediocrity which disguised
them as only ordinary men and reveals the hidden rock of
noble character.
Hunger, in my opinion, does not change the intrinsic
things that make one man good and another bad. It only
accentuates the stuff of which a man is made. His reaction
to the realization that he is dying of starvation depends on
the kind of man he is. He may quit trying and lie back on
his mat in a state of apathy, or he may work still harder to
live. If he is a quitter and does not try he also usually is a
chronic bellyacher. Loudly he denounces as incompetent or
dishonest his leaders and all workers. But he himself will
not lift a finger to help anyone. If he is a worker he re-
doubles his efforts to earn money or acquire food by handi-
crafts, trading or black marketing. The entrepreneur falls
into two classes: he who works solely for the purpose of
keeping himself alive and he who works for profits he can
bank after the war.
The man who works for post-war profits operates openly
as a loan shark or racketeer trading on the cupidity or
hunger of his fellows. Such men are not peculiar only to
internment camps.
The honest worker will stay honest, but he will use
every honorable means, no matter how desperate or fantas-
tic, to obtain food.
When all the chips are down it is the man with the will
to live, and the ingenuity to use the will, who survives.
And, in addition to will and ingenuity, he must have some-
thing else: some call it luck.
A man I’ll call The Droop was an example of survival
through blind luck, or the inscrutable designs of Provi-
dence, call it what you will. He was an Englishman in his
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fifties who had been invalided by heart disease before the
war. His chances of surviving even the excitement of the
Bangka Straits had not been considered good and the odds
against his surviving the privations of prison camp were
astronomical. But he did. Throughout internment he did
not lift a finger to help himself unless no one else would
lift it for him. He walked out when freedom came, a living
example of sheer luck.
But whatever their natures, their characters or their luck,
hungry men have one thing in common: the continuous
thought of food. Awake, the hungry man talks about food
and schemes how to get it. Asleep, he dreams about it.
When a man is starving, life reduces itself to a never end-
ing quest for something to eat. All other material things
are secondary.
Between a man who is hungry but not yet starving and
a man who is actually starving there is a distinct difference.
The hungry man begrudges the scraps the cat must eat to
live. The starving man eats the cat. The hungry man curses
the rats which plague him. The starving man eats the rats.
The hungry man wishes he could eat leaves. The starving
man does eat them.
Not every one in Muntok Prison, of course, was starving.
Just as in any famine-ridden land there are those who have
plenty, and if not plenty at least enough, in prison there
were those who somehow managed to supplement their
diets. Kitchen staff men were the best nourished. They
were well padded and in no danger of beri-beri. Next in
order of nourishment came successful black market op-
erators and their more prosperous customers. Some black
marketeers and kitchen workers actually grew fat. Members
of the working parties whose jobs took them outside the
jail to cut wood or tend gardens frequently were able to
trade with natives who hid in nearby shrubbery, or with
Indonesian guards who were not averse to supplementing
their meager salaries with a quick profit.
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The friendly Javanese police who guarded us in Palem-
bang were replaced in Bangka by Indonesians of various
races, mostly Sumatra Malays. They were volunteer soldiers,
members of a Nippon-recruited “People’s Army,” known
by the Japanese designation of Haiho. Many of them
were thugs openly hostile to whites but nearly all of them
were susceptible to bribery. Every shift of guards had
a few Japanese soldiers in it but the Japanese could not
be everywhere at once.
A standard and strictly legal source of extra nourishment
was given as payment for the heavy jobs that had to be
done to keep things going. The time came when it was
impossible to maintain our self-run jail facilities — cooking,
cleaning, nursing, wood cutting, coffin carrying, grave dig-
ging— without giving extra food to workers so that they
would have the strength to carry on. Therefore, men doing
certain jobs were allotted “calories”— loo grams of food
more per day than the rank and file of non-workers. The
necessary amount was deducted from camp rations. How-
ever, “calories” did not guarantee a man sufficient strength
to carry on. If he burned up more energy than he could
replenish, he dropped out of the working party.
In my diary is the comment:
“Truly, as a man told the Camp Committee today, only
those fortunate enough to get extra food in one way or
another will walk out of here when freedom comes. So it
is understandable why men, after they have eaten, lick their
plates like dogs.”
Luckily for me, the period of acute food shortage did
not begin until I had recovered from the bout with cerebral
malaria and had returned to work. Doc West’s gifts, the
extras from other friends and the small reserve I had saved
from better days against such an emergency, put me back
on my feet. Another important factor was that by nature I
am thin and therefore did not have so much to lose when
I lost, or so much to put back when I recovered.
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Rice was the backbone of our diet— our bread and meat.
The other staple was a potato-like vegetable known as ubi
kayu: that’s Malay for wood root, and a singularly descrip-
tive name. It is the Malaya and East Indies variety of the
tropical South American plant known variously as manioc
or cassava. Tapioca is one of its many by-products. Ubi
kayu is an edible tuber below ground and a long stemmed,
half-shrubby plant above. We ate not only the root but
the leaves. Dutch doctors said the topmost cluster of leaves
contained Vitamin B. Why only the topmost and not the
others is one of Mother Nature’s mysteries. The leaves must
be well boiled in order to be chewed successfully. The root
is a pure starch and has two layers of skin, the outer layer
being poisonous— secreting hydrocyanic acid.
By March, 1944, our daily diet per man had fallen to 130
grams (4^^ ounces) of rice plus varying amounts (100 to
300 grams) of ubi root and leaves and a large tablespoon
of evil smelling fish sauce. Occasionally and irregularly this
diet was supplemented by bits of dried fish, one per man,
about the size of a domino, and infinitesimal amounts of
maize, green beans or palm oil. Fish sauce was made for
two reasons: there was too little to serve any other way and
the fish had been dead so long that boiling and spicing with
pepper was necessary to make them palatable. Hungry as we
were, many men, including myself, could not stomach the
sauce. These rations were divided into two or three
meals a day, depending on the amount of ubi kayu avail-
able.
Breakfast was an ubi kayu porridge known as ongel-
ongel, a name which tickled my fancy because it so well
described its substance and the sensation of eating it. Ongel-
ongel was a tasteless, grey-white, transparent liquid when
hot; cold, it hardened to a rubbery gelatin. Cold ongel-
ongel looked so much like a poultice I decided to try it as
such on the festered hands of a Frenchman named Albert.
It worked. After two days I removed the poultice by dissolv-
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ing in warm water. Albert's hands were white as a fish’s
belly but the blisters had been drawn.
Unfortunately, ongel-ongel was too scarce a food com-
modity to be used on other blister patients, and even had
it been plentiful I doubt that it would have proved prac-
tical on our most annoying blister areas— Palembang Bot-
toms. Hot water remained the universal remedy. So large
did the hot bath trade become that Shell craftsmen built
a special boiler for the hospital. Two oil drillers ran it,
Nick Koot who made the containers in which I buried
Camp News, and Peter de Groot, a barrel-chested husky
who spoke seven languages and coaxed the boiler fire in all
of them. They constructed a sitz bath by cutting a gaso-
line tank in half and beveling the edges. Customers were
handled with assembly-line precision; twenty minutes per
patient and thirty or forty patients per shift. Reserved
seats only.
Toward the end of March Peanut announced that he
had wonderful news for us. The military would take back
control of prison camps April 1st.
“You will receive more and better food,” he said. “I am
happy for you.”
As a sign of his happiness he issued his most memorable
communique. It said American forces had turned the
Marshall Islands into a vast “floating airdrome” and that
the Pacific war would end in April, 1945, just one year
more.
The promised ration improvement did not materialize
under military administration; but we were given monthly
stipends of one and one half and later four guilders per
man per month. The entire amount was put into the
kitchen fund but there was little the Chinese contractor
could buy.
Every ounce of incoming food, both Japanese issued
and contractor purchased, had been weighed on our kitchen
scales to check both on Japanese promises and the con-
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tractor’s honesty. The new commandant confiscated the
scales, saying, “The Japanese army is honest. We give full
weight as promised. And if we do not give full weight the
reason is because there is not enough to be given.”
The commandant amazed us April 27, 1944, by including
us in a Japanese celebration of Emperor Hirohito’s birth-
day. Every prisoner received two cookies, one banana and
two ounces of arak, a raw alcoholic drink. He further
cheered us by announcing that rations would be increased
in May and that our hospital would be enlarged by being
moved next door into the building that had been a coolie
quarantine depot for the Bangka Tin Winning Company.
The hospital would occupy one wing of the building and
the other wing would be used to house 250 prisoners and
reduce crowding in the jail.
The hospital was moved, rations did increase but only
for two weeks; and instead of two hundred prisoners being
transferred to the Tin Winning building’s other wing, two
hundred new prisoners arrived. The newcomers were pale
as death, unbelievably emaciated and, by the alacrity with
which they obeyed, even anticipating orders, we could
tell they had been well broken. For two years they had
been jammed into locked cells of the jail at Pangkal Pinang,
capital of Bangka Island. They had not been allowed out-
side their cells even for exercise. Our freedom to move
around inside the jail and run our own internal affairs
surprised them. What delighted them most, however, was
our food. Our food— on which we were starving!
E. M. C. Aubrey-Scott, 25, a skeleton-thin Englishman
who was brought directly into hospital, began to cry when
he received his first meal in Muntok prison.
“This is heaven,” he said over and over in a choking
voice.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“This food,” he said, as the tears came. “It’s so wonder-
ful. You cook it yourselves.”
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In Pangkal Pinang jail the food, already cooked and little
more than slop, had been supplied by a piratical Indonesian
contractor. Pangkal Pinang Jail had been run entirely by
Indonesians who, judging from tales told of them, were
much worse than Japanese.
Despite the privations they suffered, however, Pangkal
Pinangers were free from disease, except for a few pellagra
cases like Aubrey-Scott. Malaria, severe beri-beri and dysen-
tery had not yet visited them. But Doc West said it would
not be long.
“They are in such poor condition," he said, “that they’ll
go quickly when they get our dysentery and malaria."
Prophetic words. Within six months half of them were
dead.
But how desperately they fought to keep alive! Their
efforts were refleeted immediately by that barometer of
desperation, rodent priees.
The priee of eooking-rats, whieh had been retailing at
one to two guilders, soared to five. They were hard to cateh.
Miee went to two and one half guilders eaeh. A member of
the British eommittee, and not a Pangkal Pinanger, who
had a standing offer of one guilder for a rat and fifty cents
for a mouse, was indignant when the price zoomed to five
and 2.50 respectively.
One of the Pangkal Pinang men uncovered a nest of
newborn mice.
“How much will you give me for them?" he asked the
Britisher.
“Two guilders and they aren’t worth that, they’re so
small."
“Three," demanded the salesman.
They compromised at two and one half. The buyer ate
them raw because, he explained, “they are too small to
cook. They’d disintegrate."
Bats were numerous when the Pangkal Pinangers arrived.
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but their numbers rapidly dwindled as hunters stalked
them day and night with homemade butterfly nets.
Ants, red or black but red and fat preferred, became a
source of grease to flavor rice. I never tasted them myself
but gourmands who caught and fried them said they were
not bad. The chief selling point of fried ants was that
grease of any kind was nourishment.
The Tin Winning building was a structure shaped like a
block U. Between the wings of the U was a rectangular
soncrete platform called a pendopo, about 150 feet long
and one third as wide. It was roofed but open on the sides.
In prewar days it had served, probably, as an open air din-
ing hall. On either side of the pendopo was a strip of grass;
on the open end of the U was an area of weeds, tall grass
and a few trees, the whole enclosed by a barbed wire fence
and a thick hedge.
Pangkal Pinangers quickly combed the weed grown plot
for grubs. When the grubs were gone they plucked the
grass and weeds and tree leaves and boiled them. Nor were
Pangkal Pinangers the only ones. British planters from
Malaya and Dutch burghers from Palembang followed
suit.
The dogs that had precipitated an election crisis in Pa-
lembang would have been among the first things into cook-
ing pots had they been around after the ongel-ongel days
began. But they had been killed and buried shortly after
arriving in Muntok Prison because they no longer could
be fed and death was more merciful than starvation.
Mehitabel the cat and her offspring, on whom we had
lavished our pork fat, had been allowed to live only because
they could exist on rats. But they did not live long after the
Pangkal Pinangers arrived. A cleaning gang found their
heads and hides in a septic tank. Two dogs and a monkey
which somehow got into the yard were next.
A hospital ward attendant told me that on his shift one
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day he caught two patients in the lavatory eating
maggots.
‘‘Holy Mackerel,” I said, “we’d better guard the mortu-
ary at night or they’ll be gnawing on the corpses.”
Such a strange glint suddenly appeared in his eyes that
I thought about it for days afterwards. That man, I thought,
was up to something.
Long afterward, when I no longer worked in the hospital,
I learned what it was. He told me himself. Whenever a
man died during his shift he inspected the dead man’s
mouth for gold teeth or gold fillings. If there were any he
removed the teeth.
“I got a kilo of rice from a Haiho for each gold tooth,”
he said, “and smaller amounts, depending on the size, for
a filling.
“The teeth weren’t hard to pull out. You know, I
noticed that the gums of most men became very soft and
their teeth got loose when they died of beri-beri. And if
they weren’t loose I used a pair of pliers. ITie difficult part
was doing it unobserved.”
He laughed ruefully.
“Sounds terrible to say I pulled dead men’s teeth, doesn’t
it? But that wasn’t as bad as eating maggots.”
I agreed that it was not.
Bats, rats, grubs, ants and maggots were protein and men
were dying for lack of protein. A man’s muscles are protein.
If the body can’t get protein any other way it feeds on the
muscles until none are left and a man looks like the living
skeleton in a circus side show.
The mind deteriorates too. Lack of protein affects the
brain. Memory suffers, the power of concentration goes.
Study becomes more and more difficult and finally is
abandoned. A deadly lassitude lays hold of men. They cease
to care about anything, even about eating. If friends do
not snap them out of their inertia they simply disintegrate
and die. When an internee’s mind went his body soon fol-
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lowed. Fortunately, very few serious mental cases developed.
We all became a little warped, I think, before the end, but
only a small number completely lost their minds. And
those few soon died. The body seems to reach a certain
stage beyond which only the will power to survive will
keep it alive.
Max Breuer, 34-year'Old dark-skinned Indo-European
policeman, whom we had written off as a chronic malaria
case doomed for the beri-beri ward, was an example of the
will to live conquering a body seemingly scheduled to die.
For months he lay in the fever ward, apathetic between
his spells of shivering and sweating. His malaria was not
severe, like cerebral, but was chronic and slowly wearing
him down. Something, I don't know what, snapped him
out of his apathy. He began to fight. He asked Doc West
to move him out of the hospital proper to what we called
the Old Men's Ward, in the opposite wing of the Tin Win-
ning building. Tliere, convalescing patients and old men
were more or less on their own but still got hospital
food.
Every morning Max dragged himself out to the weed lot
and picked and boiled a mess of “greens." Soon he was
cooking not only for himself but for others and charging
for the services. With the money, he bought black market
condiments to flavor his “greens," and made more money
to buy more condiments plus food for himself. His body
grew stronger. By nature he was a heavy-set, muscular fel-
low. His wasted frame began to fill out. He left the Old
Men's Ward and moved into one of the Pangkal Pinang
cells where death had thinned the population so there was
plenty of room. In time Max became a fat black-market
operator because he had the guts and the will, plus the
ingenuity.
Wembley-Smythe had the guts and the will but not the
ingenuity'. When Beissel lost his job as chief cook— because
the oil men got control and ousted him— Wembley-Smythe
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lost his job too. He was too clumsy for any but kind hearted
Beissel to keep on the staff.
Cut off from calories he had received as a kitchen worker
and congenitally unable to do anything to help himself, he
had to depend entirely on camp rations. They were not
enough to give his body the strength to resist chronic
malaria and septic sores. He began to fade. The future
looked grim for Wembley-Smythe, with whom I had de-
bated immortality after the moonlight thunderstorm.
Another fatal weakness in prison camp was an inordinate
appetite for sweets or fancy things— for dessert instead of the
main course. Numbers of men with such appetites suc-
cumbed by their own folly.
They sold their rice, the bulk of our diet, in order to buy
tastier morsels on the black market: bits of fish, minuscule
prawns, palm sugar, bean curd cakes or even fried ubi.
Such tidbits, they said, satisfied their hunger more than
rice. Others sold their rice in order to buy tobacco. Tobacco
was solace for empty stomachs. It soothed nerves rasped by
confined living. It helped bridge the aching gap between
6:30 A.M. porridge and mid-afternoon rice. But it was not
food. And those who sold their rice to buy tobacco or other
luxuries inevitably ended in the beri-beri ward.
Disposal of dead men’s effects became a major problem.
The hospital benefited by getting their rags for bandages
but disposition of more useful articles and money caused
endless bickering and quarrels among neighbors of the de-
ceased. Ghoulish “friends” frequently could not wait for
a man to die before they began looting his possessions. A
partial solution to the problem was obtained by having all
internees fill in brief, prepared forms, appointing executors
of their jail estates. Since most men died in hospital we be-
came watchdogs of their effects, fending off the efforts of
executors or would-be executors to get possession of their
belongings before they were turned over to the Camp Corn-
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mittee which ‘"probated” the estates according to the
wills.
As theft and chiseling became more frequent the Camp
Committee drafted a system of laws and penalties and estab-
lished our own private jail within our prison to punish
offenders. The jail was the room in which we had performed
the secret autopsy. Men caught stealing food, clothing or
other things were locked in it for various periods. Chiselers
were those men who by various stratagems, such as appear-
ing twice in a food queue, got more than they were entitled
to; or who shirked compulsory corvee when they were not
sick. They were penalized by being deprived of rations in
varying amounts for varying times, depending on the severity
of their oflfense.
Weaklings and dolts, ghouls and thieves, fools and mere
good hearted bunglers were more conspicuous than men
who lived or died quietly but gallantly; nevertheless, we
had our share of brave and self sacrificing men, such as the
father who every day gave part of his food to his sons. On
the principle they needed it just as much, probably more,
boys under sixteen were given extra calories, the same as
workers. So the particular Dutch father I refer to was not
morally or otherwise obliged to give away a single fraction
of his food to his sons. But he did regularly and is num-
bered among the dead.
There was a kongsie of four men, three of whom fell ill.
Two lay side by side in hospital in the beri-beri ward and
the third lay in his block with chronic malaria. The fourth
man, a slender, middle-aged Englishman who looked as
though a strong wind would blow him away, worked des-
perately to save them. By buying and selling, working and
scheming he managed every day to get something extra for
his friends. It looked for a while as if he would save all three
but the beri-beri victims finally died. When they died the
friend was able to concentrate all his efforts on the chronic
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teen brothers of the Bangka mission headed by Monsignor
Bouma. The priests were of the same order to which Father
Bakker belonged, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of
Jesus and Mary, famous for an illustrious member known
to the world as Father Damien of Molokai, the Hawaiian
leper colony.
I think that something of the fire that burned in the heart
of Father Damien burned also in the heart of Father Bak-
ker. Although he never said a word it was obvious from his
actions that Father Bakker dedicated himself to the task of
saving his fellow missionaries, especially Monsignor Bouma,
from the beri-beri ward.
Bishop Mekkelholt did for the Bangka missionaries what
he could but he had his hands full trying to keep his own
priests and brothers from Sumatra alive. The Bangka' clergy
had to depend mostly on themselves.
So Father Bakker cooked and scrubbed, bought and sold.
One of his business enterprises was selling cigarets rolled in
paper instead of nipa leaves. The papers were torn from
breviaries. Every bit of extra food he earned went to feed
the sick. He was burning himself out. But instead of reduc-
ing his self-imposed tasks of helping his friends, in order
to help himself, he merely cut down on his personal pleas-
ures, such as studying and composing, and devoted the
time saved to assisting his helpless companions.
They were helpless in two ways. The Pangkal Pinang
Jail had sapped their vitality. And they did not have the
necessary ingenuity. Unlike the Sumatra missionaries, Mon-
signor Bouma and most of his men seemed unable to
cope with the exigencies of black market barter or the
sheer struggle for survival. Consequently, the task fell on
the shoulders of a few practical priests like Father Bakker.
As the lean months passed the burden proved too much.
Father Bakker’s limbs swelled; his feet and hands began
to bear the familiar lesions of malnutritional disease. Malaria
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bouts increased in frequency. By the end of 1944 he could
not even direct the remnants of his beloved choir.
As deaths mounted so did our protests, written and verbal,
to the Japanese. On June 19th Captain Seki, commander of
all south Sumatra internee affairs, moved his headquarters
to Muntok and replied in person to our pleas. Every man
who could walk— there were 910 in prison then and about
200 too sick to attend— stood at attention in the long open
air pendopo to hear Seki speak. His words were translated
into Malay by a Japanese interpreter who was the most
hated man in Muntok.
Seki said our prospects were for more work and less food.
We must grow our own food or starve. No more rice would
be imported from the Sumatra mainland. Rations would
be reduced fifteen per cent immediately. We must furnish
200 more men for cultivating outside gardens — and the
gardeners would get no extra nourishment for their efforts.
Seki said he was sorry for the old men and the sick but
that Japan had not started the war. Bangka was a war theater
with the imminent possibility of action. Japanese soldiers
must come first in food consideration. He concluded his
talk by saying,
“Please do not get sick, so that when the war ends you
can all go home.”
Derisively we laughed and hooted. Seki looked at the in-
terpreter and the interpreter exploded into a tirade of abuse
for our insult to the captain.
The fifteen per cent reduction made it impossible for our
kitchen crew to stretch rations into three meals a day. There-
after we had only two and no more ongel-ongel.
July 31st the Camp Committee handed another letter
to Seki:
“It is now no longer a case of the older and weaker men
dying through under-nourishment. Young men in their
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twenties who but recently went out to work in the vegetable
gardens at your request are dying, after a brief illness, owing
to lack of resistance as a result of under-nourishment. We
state plainly that, if our food supply is not quickly im-
proved, the health of the camp will be completely under-
mined and the internees will succumb to fatal illnesses in
increasing numbers. And this with the full knowledge of
Nippon authorities, whose attention we have repeatedly
drawn to the seriousness of our situation.
“We fully understand that the war effort is of primary
importance in your eyes. We realize that the food situation
may be diEcult. But we can not understand that a respon-
sible Japanese government and the Japanese Military Au-
thorities will stand by idly while the death rate amongst
internees increases at such an alarming rate as has been the
case here.
“Our letter addressed to you and dated July 8th has re-
mained unanswered. The situation is serious. Only quick
and radical improvement of our food supply will prevent
disastrous consequences. We rely upon you, as the officer
in charge of this internment camp, to realize the gravity of
the situation and to take all steps in your power to forestall
a catastrophe.”
Seki did nothing to forestall it. Rather did he worsen
matters by moving the Women’s Camp from Palembang to
Muntok, thereby placing an added strain on Bangka Island’s
dwindling food supplies.
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The Beri-Beri Song
O N A bright June morning in 1944 ^ heard
the weird wailing that came to be known as the
beri-beri song. None who sang it lived to dis-
close the reason but we had an uncanny feeling the
singers were conscious of their act. Why they did it remains
a mystery, the answer to which lies buried in rows of graves
beneath the pepper trees of Bangka Island.
Beri-beri patients lay in a ward identical with others in
the prison hospital. Concrete platforms forty feet long and
eight feet wide lined either side of the room, with a narrow
walk between. The same number of men lay shoulder to
shoulder on the benches which sloped slightly from the
wall downward to the aisle. A small ledge ran along the foot
of the shelves and kept things from sliding off onto the
floor. Liquid suppurating from pores of swollen victims ran
in little rivulets down the slope and collected along the
ledge.
Not all patients were filled with liquid. Many were little
more than skeletons. Two types of the disease were most
common in Muntok: hydropic, or “wet,” wherein victims
filled with water, and atropic, or “dry,” wherein they dried
out and shriveled up like angleworms in the sun. Why some
shriveled and others swelled I don't know. Both types started
the same way. First symptoms appeared four months after
our ongel-ongel diet began. And the first deaths were in
May, one month after initial symptoms.
203
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Beri-beri is a malnutritional scourge caused primarily by
lack of Vitamin B in the diet. Protein deficiency is a sec-
ondary cause. First symptoms usually are swelling— caused
by oedema— of the feet, numbness of certain areas of the
legs and a peculiar walk: the victim “slapping" the ground
with his feet and staggering as though intoxicated. The
swollen flesh is flaccid and, if squeezed, fingerprints remain
as though pressed into wet clay. As the disease progresses,
serous fluid fills and expands tissues of the entire body and,
in a cold, steady stream, sweats through distended pores.
The peritoneal and pleural cavities fill and the victim
literally drowns in his own juice.
The wet type is deadlier than the dry. I can remember
no hydropic case recovering after having reached an ad-
vanced stage, whereas there were several recoveries from the
advanced atropic state.
Response to proper and early treatment is remarkably fast.
In Muntok, proper treatment meant food containing Vita-
min B and protein. The green bean known as kachang ijau
is fabulously rich in Vitamin B and when obtainable in
sufficient quantity worked unbelievably rapid cures. If the
patient could digest them the beans were eaten raw after
being soaked overnight; then the water was drained off and
the beans were allowed to stand another twelve to twenty-
four hours, until they began to sprout. At that point, due to
some internal chemical change, the bean was richest in
Vitamin B content. As the bean sprouted the Vitamin B
content decreased and Vitamin C was built up. Patients
suffering skin lesions caused by Vitamin C shortage were
fed well-sprouted beans.
Kachang ijau's magic was demonstrated on our first two
cases of pronounced oedema: an Englishman named Grixoni
and a Dutch Catholic brother. They expanded like balloons.
Within one week Grixoni’s weight shot up 19.8 pounds and
the Brother's 26.4, due entirely to water in the tissues. Doc
West obtained enough kachang ijau, through a Japanese
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guard and the black market, to feed them large amounts. In
a few days the swelling began to subside. In two weeks they
were completely “deflated.” The Brother survived intern-
ment and Grixoni died, but months later and of malaria
and dysentery, not beri-beri.
Men who lay in the Muntok beri-beri ward were those for
whom there was not enough kachang ijau and who conse-
quently could not be “deflated” like Grixoni and the
Brother.
If they lay there long enough they developed one, or two
or sometimes all three painful complications: creeping bed
sores, septic legs or beri-beri blisters. The septic legs began
as deep ulcers, usually below the knee, and kept expanding,
sometimes completely encircling the leg. Our only treat-
ment was soaking in hot water, cutting away dead tissue
and applying wet dressings. Maggots invariably invaded
those particular wounds and assisted in the scissoring proc-
ess. Doctors said the maggots actually were beneficial but
patients complained of pain and itching.
The blisters usually occurred on thighs grotesquely swol-
len by oedema. The blisters were enormous things, tense
with serum and sometimes extending from knee to groin.
They erupted with astonishing suddenness. Puncturing and
draining alleviated pain but the victim was doomed because
flesh beneath the blisters was dead. Medically the condition
is known as “hydropic necrosis of subcutaneous tissues.”
Both septic and blistered legs invariably were fatal, death
resulting from general toxemia.
The first high-pitched, long drawn notes of the beri-beri
song awakened me one morning before roll call. They were
a song-like wail such as I imagined keening might be.
Curiosity impelled me to rise, slip my toes into a pair of
sandals and explore along the hospital veranda, tracing the
noise to its source. One after another I passed the two
fever wards, the beri-beri ward, the septic ward and came
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BY EASTERN WINDOWS
to the dysentery ward. The noise then sounded behind me.
I had overshot the source. Turning back to the septic ward
I went in, walked down the aisle and joined the attendant
who was leaning over a 40-year-old rubber planter I will
call Maurice.
Maurice was not in the beri-beri ward because in addition
to that disease he was covered with septic sores. He had
been the “pretty boy" of our community, spending hours
in finicky cleaning and washing of his person and clothing,
gazing into a tiny hand mirror and combing and recombing,
combing and recombing his thinning hair. Now his dandi-
fied body, from scalp line to toes, was a solid incrustration
of scabs and pus. He lay flat on his back, his knees drawn
up so that the soles of his feet rested on the bench. His
hands were folded over his chest and the fingers picked at
each other. His eyes were open and peered intently at the
ceiling, as if trying to discern some dimly seen object above
him. And he was singing. Not with words, but with a long
drawn a-a-a-ah which rose and fell in a tune strangely simi-
lar to “Waltzing Matilda." I stepped up on the bench
beside him and, squatting down, asked if he wanted any-
thing. Changing a dressing frequently eased the pain of
serum filled sores. He rolled his head to look at me but con-
tinued the wail. Again I asked him,
“Do you want something?"
He stopped singing, closed his mouth, opened it as though
he were about to speak, but did not. While I felt his pulse
he rolled his head back to his former position, peered at the
ceiling and resumed the song.
The sack he used for a blanket had been pushed aside. I
pulled it back over him and stepped off the bench. The
attendant wondered aloud if we should call Doc West be-
cause Maurice was keeping everyone awake. We decided
not. Roll call soon would sound anyway. I looked around
the gloomy ward. It was always dim inside because the only
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windows were at the end next to the door. Here and there
men were propped up on their elbows, watching. A patient
requested a light for his nipa straw cigaret. The attendant
brought him the small night kerosene lamp and lit it. An-
other man called for a bedpan. The attendant hurried to
him. I walked out into the open to breathe the clean air of
dawn and listen to the birds bustling in the durian trees
beyond the fence.
The singing grew louder after roll call. Doc West tried
to quiet him but Maurice would only pause momentarily,
look at Doc as a blind man looks in the direction of a sound,
working his lips as if trying to speak, then resume the wail.
Around seven o'clock the song changed to loud groans and
cries. We collected our breakfasts of boiled ubi and tried
not to hear Maurice while we ate.
After breakfast I worked as usual in the septic ward
where Maurice lay next to a rabbit-like little man I'll call
Bunny. While I was dressing Bunny's sores Maurice sud-
denly galvanized into action. With a raucous groan which
set my teeth on edge he slowly rose from the bench to a
sitting posture. It was as though a corpse on a morgue slab
had sat up to look around.
He was in the grip of a violent muscular contraction
which affected all parts of his body. The cords of his neck
and throat were taut and distended. His fingers became
talons reaching for some invisible thing. His lips drew back
from his teeth in a sardonic, skull-like grin. So widely star-
ing were his white-socketed eyes that the lids appeared torn
from them. Wildly he stared at whatever it was for which
he reached and tried to grasp and convey to his half open
mouth. I decided he was trying to bring air to his bubbly
lungs.
He rolled from side to side, throwing his arms and hands
over Bunny, then twisting to the other side and trying to
climb the wall, then rolling back again to half embrace
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Bunny. It was almost as though he hated Bunny and was
trying to take the little man with him into some realm of
nightmare.
Bunny was too weak to move. He had a hole in his lower
abdomen where yesterday Doc Boerma had cut into his
bladder and inserted a drain tube as a desperate expedient
to lessen his last agonies. Bunny could only plead:
“Keep him off me. Please.”
A morphine injection gradually quieted Maurice. His
writhing decreased to restless twitching, his breathing be-
came stertorous. An hour later he suddenly became quiet. I
felt for his pulse. It was not. As I held his wrist Maurice
relaxed, tension drained from his muscles, his jaw sagged
as a last exhalation emptied his body of life.
The following morning I noticed that Bunny paid no
attention to flies which settled on his face.
“How are you?” I asked.
“It’s no use, Mae,” he replied. “I’m finished.”
Trying to convince him otherwise would have been mock-
ery. I thanked him for the language lessons he had given
me before his illness and asked if there was anything he
wanted done.
“Will you pray for me?”
I promised I would. He thought of something else.
“If I act like Maurice,” he said, “hold my hand. I don’t
want to go that way.”
Bunny sang the beri-beri song two mornings later. He was
spared the convulsions Maurice had experienced. He
drifted from song into coma while I held his hand. When
he was past knowing whether or not he was alone I returned
to work. He died that afternoon.
Next singer was a man of 29 we called The Gow. He
burst into a wild, frenetic wail about seven a.m. But, unlike
the two before him and the scores who followed, we were
sure The Gow knew what he was doing.
“Why are you singing?” I asked him.
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“I have to/’ he said between snatches of the dreadful
melody. ‘'I have to.”
That was the nearest we ever came to an answer. Like
Maurice, The Gow went into a long series of convulsions,
but unlike Maurice he remained, apparently, aware of his
actions although powerless to stop them. His lips formed
the same death’s head grin, his eyelids disappeared behind
his eyeballs, his body tensed and writhed and twisted. He
clawed for air.
Acting on a theory that the wailing and convulsions might
be caused by an acute shortage of salt in the body. Doc
put a tube into The Gow and poured a salt solution into
his stomach. He finally quieted, drifted into the inevitable
coma and died in the afternoon. As we carried him from
the ward other men on the bench, who looked as if they
were going to go in the same way, watched uneasily.
The fourth song filled hospital rooms the following morn-
ing. I was talking to a 37-year-old English seaman nick-
named Flash when he broke into loud wailing. It was like
watching a man go insane.
Flash had been shipwrecked and survived wearing noth-
ing but a pair of shorts. He acquired little else during in-
ternment. All his possessions were on the bench beside him.
They totaled four empty tins, two of them rusty; a battered
enamel plate, a wooden spoon and a metal fork, half of a
coconut shell, a bottle from which the neck had been
broken and a half finished dart board. He had worked on
the dart board intermittently for two years. Flash was a
fighter but the odds were against him because, like Wemb-
ley-Smythe, he had not the necessary ingenuity or the luck
for survival. He was a scrawny fellow when I first met him.
Now his grotesquely swollen body was wracked by malaria
and incrusted with ringworm, itch and septic sores. But he
remained cheerful, frequently smiling and deprecating his
ills, often apologizing for the '‘trouble” he caused hospital
attendants.
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BY EASTERN WINDOWS
Flash expressed concern for the first time over his condi-
tion when pains wracked his chest and arms the night after
The Gow’s death. He asked the night man how sick he was.
The night man did not have the heart to tell him. When
the day man came he would not tell him either. Eric and I
visited Flash before breakfast. We knew he wouldn’t be
around much longer and we liked him. Eric had just lit a
cigaret and placed it between Flash’s lips when an abrupt,
hoarse, involuntary cry wrenched its way from the sick man’s
throat.
Flash looked at Eric, then at me. Fear was in his eyes,
but he said not a word. The cigaret had fallen to the bench.
Eric picked it up and replaced it between Flash’s lips. Flash
took a few drags then shuddered violently, dropped the
cigaret again and cried a second time. The paroxysm passed
as quickly as it had come.
‘‘I’m sorry,” said Flash, “I can’t help it.”
About half past eight I was working nearby when Flash
again groaned loudly. I asked him if he wanted another
cigaret.
“I’d like it if you have one,” he said.
I walked down to the staflF room, selected a nipa leaf,
placed a few grains of tobacco on it, rolled it and returned
to Flash. He smiled his thanks and said,
“Don’t go away, will you, if . . . if . .
“Okay, Flash. I’ll stick around.”
I lit the cigaret and was about to put it between his" lips
when, as though a switch had been thrown in his brain.
Flash passed from reason to delirium. He talked nonsense,
then began to sing. The tune, as with Maurice before, was
not unlike “Waltzing Matilda.” Convulsions followed. So
did the shot of morphine> the coma, the stertorous breath-
ing.
Because he had asked me not to go away I put a stool on
the bench beside him, in the space left vacant by Bunny’s
death, and waited. Other patients glanced apprehensively
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in our direction. Hospital visitors wandered in and out,
staring as they passed. Attendants hurried up and down the
aisle, wielding bedpans. Tommy Thomson, the hospital
quartermaster, made his rounds taking orders for soya bean
cake available only to sick men without stomach or intestinal
troubles.
Preacher Gillbrook, who had been a lay “interdenomina-
tional" missionary in North China, came in, said he guessed
Flash was a Church of England man and intoned a prayer.
The morning dragged. Tiffin time approached. Flash’s
breathing was more labored, his pulse weaker. I wondered,
“Will he die in time for me to eat?"
Food was served to patients. I’he man who lay next to
Flash was an English engineer whose swollen limbs had
more and deeper sores than any man in the ward. He used
chopsticks to eat his rice because they stretched out his
meal. Many of us used them because we could eat one grain
at a time that way and make 1 30 grams last an hour. Each
time he raised the sticks his elbow grazed Flash’s left shoul-
der. Flash died at 1:25 p.m. I pulled the sack over his face
and rose stiffly from the stool. The chopsticks had not
missed a beat.
I walked into the staff room just as Eric returned from
the food serving line carrying his plate and mine. Flash had
died in time for me to eat.
After dinner we lifted Flash’s body onto a stretcher and
carried it into the bamboo and palm shed built beside the
hospital for a mortuary. An empty box was waiting. We put
Flash in and nailed down the lid. The coffin gang slung
ropes around each end of the box, then, like Chinese coolies,
looped them over carrying poles which rested on their
shoulders, toted the coffin to the front gate and lowered it
to the ground.
Father Bakker, with the remnants of his choir, was wait-
ing at the gate. He raised his baton. The choir began “Abide
with Me." When the song ended, the pallbearers, three to
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each side, lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and were
counted through the gate. Behind came six alternate pall-
bearers, including Eric and myself. We traded off every
quarter of a mile. Two guards carrying bayoneted rifles led
the procession, two more brought up the rear. The road
wound through a green, park-like section of Muntok. Men
usually liked to go on funerals because of the walk.
The cemetery, an old one laid out by the Dutch, who
had colonized Bangka and developed the pepper plantations
and tin deposits, had been expanded for internees and was
growing rapidly. Mounds of red laterite marked the resting
places of prisoners who had preceded Flash. Six open graves
waited for succeeding guests.
We lowered the coffin into the first of the four foot deep
holes. British Leader Hammet read Church of England
burial services. When he had finished he reached down,
picked up a handful of red soil and tossed it onto the coffin,
saying,
“Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou
shalt return."
Following suit, we each stooped, picked up some earth
and cast it. It struck the wood with a rattling, hollow
sound. The Japanese guards saluted. We filled the hole.
Hammet shoved the end of a wooden cross into the soft
dirt. Painted in black letters on the cross were Flash's name
and the date. Because the new commandant had not con-
tinued Peanut's custom of providing flowers for funerals,
we broke a few leafy stems from shrubs which grew along
the cemetery edge, laid them on the grave and departed.
Back in jail I lay down to rest. Voices from the ward next
door indicated Doc West was making his late rounds. My
eyes closed and my ears followed him from patient to
patient, anticipating his arrival beside old De Groot, a pen-
sioned colonial soldier and, at 73, the oldest man in prison.
De Groot was one of the few men who spoke Malay so
slowly and clearly I could understand every word. He enunci-
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ated deliberately, as if he were afraid he might be misunder-
stood. Since Doc could speak no Dutch and De Groot no
English, they conversed in Malay.
I heard Doc greet De Groot, and De Groot’s reply.
Calmly the old man announced that his days were ended
and that he was about to die. Only persons who know
Malay will appreciate the drama of what De Groot said in
his simple, colloquial Malay of the market place. For those
few, here are De Groot’s words.
‘'Selamat, tuan Doktor. Suda habis. Saya orang mati.
Terima kasi banyak.”
Translated literally:
“Greetings, Mister Doctor. It is finished. I am a dead
man. Thank you very much.”
He was grateful for the Doc’s attention and he was fin-
ished. By morning his voice had risen in the beri-beri song.
Then went the engineer whose chopsticks had not missed a
beat; and most of those who had watched so apprehensively
as Maurice, Bunny, The Gow and Flash were carried out.
Day after day, through June, July, August and September,
the song continued. Then it ceased as abruptly as it had be-
gun. Men still died of beri-beri but more quietly, more con-
veniently. During November the song resumed again for a
cycle of perhaps ten deaths. After that it was not heard
again.
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T he tomb-like quiet of Muntok Prison yard dur-
ing the last quarter of 1944 was broken only by
bells signaling roll call, food, funerals or work and
by the shuffling footsteps of men answering those sum-
monses. The only other sound was an undertone of discord
that, as a deceptive bed of ashes erupts to release buried
flames and gases, sporadically burst into bitter, violent in-
ternecine quarrels.
The petty hates of Barracks Camp were distilled in Mun-
tok Prison until they attained proportions of open warfare.
Morale was cracking. As a community we were disintegrat-
ing. We had forgotten how to play or study or relax. Worst
of all, we had forgotten how to laugh. In the struggle for
self-preservation too many men adopted the attitude of sur-
vival at any cost and the devil or the grave take the hind-
most.
Palembang Jail and Barracks Camp had bustled with
activities. When men were not working or studying or play-
ing cards or chess they were out sunning themselves. The
sun had been a friend in those days. Now it was an enemy
to be avoided, to be hidden from in gloomy cells. And, as
more and more men stayed in their cells around the clock,
busy only with their thoughts, they became morbid, lost
hope, sank into staring apathy.
For such as they, years passed between one meal and the
next, and months were centuries. I often wondered why so
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few of them lost their minds. Maybe they adopted the tech-
nique of a life termer I interviewed once in an American
penitentiary. He said that while in solitary confinement he
kept his sanity by learning how to make his mind a blank.
My own technique for bridging the abyss between meals
and forgetting the calendar was keeping busy. It worked
successfully. Also, my hopes of escaping never abated. They
sound so fantastic now, those schemes and plans and dreams
of escape, that I prefer not to record them. Readers might
think I was either balmy or an opium smoker. Fantastic as
they were, however, they helped keep up my spirits. I always
figured it was going to be a long war and that prisoner mor-
tality rates would be astronomical but I also always reckoned
I would be neither among the dead nor among those living
skeletons present when liberation came. I banked on either
being repatriated among newspaper men and others ex-
changed between Japan and the United States, or on escap-
ing to India or New Guinea. Louhenapessie, the smuggler,
brought me down to earth one day when we were discussing
how best to reach New Guinea.
“You're too thin now," he said. “You must get fatter.
You're not strong enough to escape."
Bitter truth. The time to escape is in the beginning when
muscles are still pliable and responsive to extraordinary
calls upon them. The jungle and the sea are not for weak-
lings. And daily I was growing weaker. But, somehow, I felt
sure, I would regain my strength.
I think there is in the world only one thing as buoyant
as love; and that is hope. Between keeping busy and hoping,
time flew.
My little world of sores and bandages, scissoring and hot
baths, kept me so occupied I seldom walked the corridor
from hospital to prison yard. When I did, it was like visit-
ing a ghost camp. Except when a bell rang the yard was
deserted. Gravel crunched with startling loudness under
foot. The air of desolation was transformed somewhat on
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walking from the yard into a cell full of men. That was like
stepping into a meeting of conspirators. Usually they were
plotting how to overthrow the Camp Committee or certain
members of it. And, if a sudden silence greeted me as I
entered, it meant they had been talking about the hospital
and what a graft hospital workers had. But the talkers them-
selves would not volunteer to nurse the sick. They only
talked and bellyached. They simply would not labor in the
septic and dysentery wards where there was danger of infec-
tion and nursing tasks frequently were stomach turning.
Arguments that '‘you may be next and have no one to nurse
y^ou" were of no avail. They would volunteer for two jobs
only: the diet kitchen and quartermaster department where
Doc West had put men of integrity. No one grew fat in the
hospital diet kitchen or in the quartermaster depart-
ment.
Other prison institutions besides the hospital were under
fire. An oil power-play in March had squeezed Beissel from
the kitchen as chief cook. Just as Van der Vliet had been
ousted from leadership in Barracks Camp ostensibly, but
not really, because of a quarrel over dogs, so Beissel’s re-
moval was attributed to a reason equally as inane. He was
accused of allowing kitchen workers to drink too much
coffee.
The same group of men tried a squeeze play on the hos-
pital, claiming that if they got control they would staff it
adequately. However, when asked to guarantee they would
man the septic and dysentery wards they hedged. West and
his staff fought back. Bishop Mekkelholt stepped into the
breach with a concrete offer of help: fifteen priests and
brothers to man the septic and dysentery wards. He made
one stipulation, that his missionaries do the whole job and
not just alternate shifts. West gladly accepted. It cost the
clergy heavily in sickness but when one dropped out another
took his place. The opposition failed to gain control. The
first severe storm had been weathered. When the next came.
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unfortunately. Doc West was not at the helm to pilot us
through.
The Japanese took Doc West from us in September and
sent him to a military camp in Palembang. Hospital condi-
tions became chaotic after he had gone and even his enemies
realized that West had been more than a medical practi-
tioner. He had been a leader and power for good. He had
the knack of cheering patients and giving them courage
even though he could not give them medicine. And he was
impartial. All patients got equal treatment. Brusque he had
been and high handed, but there was no doubt in any one’s
mind what he represented. He kept the hospital from be-
coming a political football or a factional monopoly. His
sharp tongue and blunt manner made enemies but after he
left most of them wished he was back.
In our travail we needed leaders who could command
the confidence of men of diverse blood, social strata and
nationalities; leaders who could rise above factional rivalries
of government, oil and business, with their differing ideas
of who should be in control and how. Leaders who could be
trusted by both the Haves and Have Nots, as well as by
European and Eurasian.
Although the hospital fight was settled temporarily, its
ramifications were felt in an election which put Oosten
into leadership of the camp. Oranje retired from chairman-
ship of the Camp Committee and Oosten took his place.
His tenure was a stormy one. Trouble multiplied from the
day he took office. Again the hospital was at the core of it.
Although they deprived us of Doc West, the Japanese
brought us three more doctors, making six in prison, all
Dutch. One of the newcomers, P. E. Lentze, was named
head of the hospital because in pre-war days he had been
chief surgeon of the Bangka Tin, in whose bailiwick we now
lived. Lentze was a dark skinned Indo-European of ability
and integrity and every inch a doctor and a gentleman, but
he was uiiable to cope with the kind of dogfight in which
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he found himself from the first day he entered Muntok
Prison.
I was scouting around the prison one afternoon trying to
find a man to join the hospital dressing staff. A Shell engi-
neer named E. E. de Bruyn told me humorously.
“If only we had enough healthy internees so that we could
fire from camp jobs all but two types of men, there would
be peace around here.”
“Proceed,” I said, “I’m listening.”
“There are four kinds of men,” began De Bruyn. “Num-
ber one is bright and active, number two is bright and lazy,
number three is dumb and active and number four is dumb
and lazy.
“The bright and active man must be fired from anv
smooth running organization because he is too bright and
too active for harmony. The dumb and active man also
must be fired because he causes too much trouble. Those
active men also are hard to live with. The bright one is
frustrated by the world’s inertia and the dumb one is always
in hot water.
“The men to keep in the organization are the lazy ones,
both bright and stupid— the bright and lazy because the
little he does he does well, and the stupid and lazy because
he does only what he is told. And the lazy men are easy to
live with, the bright one because he has a sense of humor
and no desire to reform the world, and the stupid one be-
cause, ignorance being bliss, he is happy.”
Grinning, I returned to work, having forgotten for a little
while how tough life was getting. I was among those wear-
ing out. The dressing job daily grew more arduous. I had
a staff of five assistants including my American partner
Eric and Mike Treurniet, who had killed the duck for my
New Year’s dinner; but seldom were all five on their feet
simultaneously. Nearly every patient in the hospital needed
dressing of some kind and the number of severe cases was
appalling. Night calls were increasingly frequent as more
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and more beri-beri blisters erupted on swollen legs. The
pace was getting me. Day and night there was a tight, dull
pain in my back. Dizzy spells and sudden, cold sweats were
increasing in frequency.
One ray of help illumined our black horizon in October
1944. The 7th of October was one of the happiest days in
our prison camp history. American Red Cross supplies ar-
rived. They were pitifully small but they raised our hopes.
‘'Now they know we ate here," we told each other. “More
will come."
More never did come but luckily we could not read the
future as we divided what was left after our guards first took
their portion. How much they took we never learned. We
only knew they smoked American cigarets for days and that
Van Asbeck reported an ever growing pile of American
butter and powdered milk tins behind Seki's house.
Suspicious of hidden messages, the guards opened all
paper wrapped packages, such as cigarets, and burned the
paper. They checked tinned goods by opening every can of
a certain brand of meat paste and removing the contents.
The paste was turned over to the kitchen and served as
“Sauce American." The tinned butter and powdered milk
that did reach us we reserved for the sick and rationed at
the rate of one spoon of powder and one spoon of butter
per patient per day while the supply lasted.
General camp distribution to each individual totaled:
eighteen cigarets, four ounces of tinned meat— three men
would divide a twelve ounce tin— one tiny slice of cheese
and one cup of weak coffee.
Late in October we received from the Red Cross 12,470
guilders, in Japanese invasion currency, and another 6,000
guilders from the Vatican.
Chairman Oosten invited me, as a representative of
America, to a meeting of the Camp Committee and made
a little speech of thanks for the Red Cross goods.
In the food queue that day Controleur de Raat, who was
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a food server, gave Eric and me a concrete expression of
gratitude.
“This is a token of appreciation to America,” he said,
and put an extra spoonful of boiled cucumbers on each of
our plates.
On November i, 1944, De Raat called at the hospital to
acknowledge he had lost his fifty-guilder bet with me that
the war would be over by that date.
“But you'll have to wait until after the war to collect,”
he said, “Fm broke.”
Even if he could have paid there was no satisfaction for
me in winning the bet. Joyfully would I have lost. Four
funerals a day were not uncommon in November. Nor were
we able any longer to carry the coffins on our shoulders. A
cart was constructed for the purpose.
As a killer malaria was forging ahead of beri-beri, dysen-
tery and sepsis. My diary for November 17th reads:
“Malaria is replacing beri-beri as the prison scourge. It
kills more quickly and frequently. Weakened by malnutri-
tion and exhausted by chronic malaria, men are dying like
flies. There is no quinine. Yesterday the Japanese gave us
24 pills— 24 quinine pills for 300 malaria-ridden men. They
are collapsing in their cells, are carried in here and die a few
hours later. Fear is paralyzing internees. Fear that ‘I may
be next.'
“Our survival is a race against time— the time of freedom.
Another six months of this and more than half of us will
have died. God send us deliverance soon.”
My own health was slipping rapidly. My back gave out
from bending too long over too many benches. Dressing
hours were from breakfast until dark, with an intermission
for midday tiffin. That was the only way we could attend
our 120 or 140 patients daily, some requiring up to an
hour's work apiece. By mid-November the prison daily sick
roster fluctuated between 400 and 500 names. Our total
population was dwindling toward 700. Only the most seri-
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ously ill of the sick roster were in hospital; others lay in
cell blocks waiting for admittance as death created vacancies
on hospital benches.
Each day I found it more difhcult to bend over the
benches or straighten up afterwards. Exhaustion dragged
at me. Dr. Lentze stopped me one day to investigate. He
listened with his stethoscope, thumped here and there,
twisted my neck and came up with two long names that
spelled B-A-D.
“Your lungs are bad and you probably have an inflamma-
tion of the spine,” he said. “No more dressing. Light work
only.”
I wasn't surprised. I had been kidding myself too long
that the ache would wear off. Oosten heard of Lentze's
verdict and went into a huddle with him. Then Oosten
made a solo decision for which I always will be grateful
but which plunged him into more controversy. Without
consulting the Camp Committee he requisitioned two one-
pound tins of powdered milk from the Red Cross supplies
and gave them to Lentze for me.
Quartermaster Thomson had the job of mixing and issu-
ing powdered milk for hospital patients. Lentze told him
to give me two cups a day while the tins lasted.
One of the other doctors blew a fuse when he learned
Oosten had requisitioned the milk for me and descended
on the Camp Committee with demands for an investigation.
Oosten defended his action, saying, “The milk came from
the American Red Cross. The least we can do is give some
to a sick American.”
Small as was the amount of milk it worked wonders,
keeping me on my feet.
About that time the Japanese showed a sudden statistical
interest in prisoner deaths. They required typewritten death
certificates, in triplicate, and a daily roster of sick with
names of ailments. I did the typing as one of my light
duties.
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Seki's interpreter banned use of the words “hunger
oedema” and “dysentery” in describing causes of death.
“Internees do not die of hunger,” he said, “they are
merely sick.”
For dysentery he insisted on substituting the word “in-
testines.”
“John Doe died of intestines.”
Doctors then began using as death causes the terms “in-
anition,” which means exhaustion from lack or non-assimila-
tion of food; and “marasmus,” which means progressive
emaciation. “Inanition” and “marasmus” were not in the
interpreter’s dictionary.
A second storm burst over the hospital in November
and Dr. Lentze resigned. He was succeeded as hospital chief
by Dr. H. P. Kramer, a tall, pompous Hollander, who with
Dr. W. Kampschuur, third of the new doctors, had been
on the medical staff of another tin mining company on the
island of Billiton. Kramer had been in office only a short
while when, backed by Dr. Hollweg and Guy Fawkes, he
crossed swords with the Camp Committee and the hospital
staff. A long drawn, bitter fight ensued during which both
the committee and the doctors appealed to the camp for
justification of their respective stands. Quartermaster Thom-
son, Engineer Harrison and I became deeply involved in the
controversy, opposing Kramer and Hollweg on one hand and
Oosten’s formulas for settlement on the other.
Who was right or wrong I will not attempt to say, be-
cause the other side would have no chance of replying. Each
of us passionately believed his side was right and the other
man’s was wrong. Let it remain thus. A blow by blow
description of the battle would make an interesting docu-
mentary on human nature but I think Bishop Mekkelholt
was right when he said, in the thick of the fray,
“I hope you don’t write all this some day.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It would only fan old animosities which are better
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buried/’ said the Bishop, “and it might seriously damage
the reputations of men who after the war will look back on
these times and feel ashamed of their actions. Don’t for-
get, all of us in here are a little abnormal.”
He was correct. I wonder how I would look if a talking
picture of myself then were played back for me now?
I never heard the Bishop say a mean or petty thing about
any man, not even about men who counted themselves his
enemies.
The following page, then, will represent a veil drawn over
a long, shameful episode in the history of our internment.
I hope the hatreds which flared during that human dog-
fight and poisoned our relations throughout the remainder
of the war have since been extinguished.
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This page is dedicated to
the peace making
of
Most Reverend H. M. Mekkelholt, S.C.J.
Vicar Apostolic
of
Palembang, Sumatra
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19
How Men Die
T hey say Beauty is in the eye of the beholder;
and so it is with Death. If a man sees in Death
the beginning of Eternal Life, then for him
Death holds no terrors except the physical agonies of pass-
ing; but if he sees in Death only a dark mirror reflecting his
own forebodings, then Death is fearful no matter how pain-
less the crossing.
Death was nothing new to me whose days as a reporter
frequently had been concerned with violence: catastrophe
and homicide, blood and tears. The persons involved, how-
ever, usually had been strangers. In prison camp they were
men whom I knew well, whose wounds I had dressed, whom
I had nursed, waited beside, laid out, encofhned and helped
bury. Having myself nearly slipped through Life's trap door,
I felt acquainted with what they were experiencing in their
extremity. Always in my mind was the thought, “There,
but for the grace of God, go I.” And I watched them to see
how they faced their final and greatest question.
In Muntok Prison alone, 259 men learned the answer
and now lie beneath the pepper trees. Some went trembling
with fear, despair or remorse; others bravely, with faith and
hope. Some died beeause they did not have the courage to
live while others went down fighting. Greed and personal
folly were as responsible in certain instanees as were hunger
and disease. There were men who cringed and whimpered
at the end and others who died almost gaily. Some wel-
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corned Death as a release from suffering; others, as the door
to paradise. Extremely few were conscious to the last. Most
entered comas hours before slipping out of life. Even upon
those who were waiting and expecting him, Death usually
stole like a thief, whisking them off minutes or hours or
days before they really knew their visitor was on the thresh-
hold.
Having watched many men die I am convinced that true
inner happiness has nothing to do with bodily ills. Men
can be in agony yet spiritually serene if they have faith in
God. Conversely, if they are wracked with doubts and the
Beyond is only a black question mark, their forebodings can
be worse than any physical pain.
There are men of no religion who die bravely, too— but
with a kind of defiance, an attitude of “whatever comes. Til
face it and be damned to it.”
Whenever I saw a man dying defiantly I thought of an
execution in the Utah State Prison in 1938. Utah gives a
condemned man his choice of being shot or hung. John
Deering, murderer, chose shooting. His was a widely her-
alded execution. Within minutes after his death his eyes
were scheduled to be removed, packed in ice and flown to
San Francisco to be used for corneal graft operations in re-
storing sight to three blind persons. The actions of his
heart during those awful seconds of suspense before the
bullets struck, and afterwards until the final beat, were to
be revealed by an electrocardiograph attached to Deering
during the execution. It was the first time in medical his-
tory a condemned man’s last moments were to be so blue-
printed.
I was one of five men who sat with Deering through his
last night alive, while he awaited dawn and the firing
squad. Outwardly, he was the calmest man in death row as
we talked the night away and discussed, among other
things, God and the hereafter.
“If God exists,” said Deering, “and I'm not saying He
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either does or does not, but if He does then He knows
everything and that Fm getting exactly what I deserve for
what Eve done. I’m paying and I figure that will balance
the books.
“Who knows?” he added facetiously, “Maybe when old
Charon ferries me across the River Styx there’ll be two
beautiful houris waiting to greet me with a jug of wine.
What I’d better do is take up a collection to pay Charon
his ferrying fee.”
Deering held out his hand.
“Give,” he said, laughing.
I dropped a fifty cent piece in his open palm.
At 4:00 A.M. when he had only two more hours to live,
Deering said he was tired and wanted to sleep. He lay
down on his bunk and slept. At five minutes to six he was
awakened, the death warrant read to him and he walked
down three flights of stairs into the prison yard where the
firing squad waited. He was strapped into a chair, a target
placed over his heart, the copper bands of the electrocardio-
graph were fastened to his wrists. He made a brief speech
and finished by saying,
“I’m ready. Let ’er go!”
The rifles cracked. After his body had been removed
from the chair and laid on a stretcher I placed the fifty cent
piece— “Charon’s fare”— which he had given back to me
when the death march started, on the bloody target over
his heart. The firing squad’s marksmanship had been ex-
cellent. The coin just covered the four bullet holes.
Apparently he had been icy calm to the last second. But
the electrocardiograph record showed he was not. The
heart specialists who studied the record said Deering was
terrified. His iron will had enabled him to hide his fear
beneath a defiant exterior. He had been on fire inside but
he put on a bold front and staged a dramatic show.
“His heart was beating so fast while he was making his
speech just before the bullets struck,” said Dr. Stephen H.
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Beesley, prison physician, “that if they had not struck and
his heart maintained that pace only a little longer he would
have collapsed and died of heart failure.”
Deering was an example, in my opinion, of how success-
fully a man can masquerade. Bold fronts no longer impress
me but a quiet heart does and I think the latter can be
detected. There is something about a peaceful heart that
communicates itself to others. At the end of a man’s life,
possession of such peace is reward beyond measure for
whatever it cost him. And nothing can compensate for its
absence.
All of which is by way of introducing the stories of some
of the men who died in Muntok Prison hospital.
If Old Pop, down-on-his-luck rubber planter who was
our first ward “matron” in Palembang Jail, could have
known it, he would have considered it some sort of omen
when the rope broke as we lowered his coffin into a grave
in Muntok cemetery. But he was inside and so knew noth-
ing of being dropped instead of lowered respectfully and
gently into the hole as we intended.
Luckily, the fragile, bulging box did not burst and spill
its contents of beri-beri swollen flesh. There was only a
bump, a crunch of wood and a sodden noise as Pop’s bulk
jolted roughly to rest.
“Remember man, that thou art dust . . intoned
Hammet, throwing a handful of earth into the grave. Other
little showers of earth rattled on the box as we each tossed
our parting tribute. Then, rubbing sore shoulders on which
the coffin had rested during the mile-long, weary march
from jail to cemetery, we retraced our steps.
There was little conversation. Pop’s passing had touched
us more than most. It seemed only yesterday instead of
two and a half years ago that he had joined us in Palem-
bang Jail and become an institution of bedpans and proph-
ecy. The two were inseparable in Pop’s case as he ran the
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dysentery ward and read his Bible, drawing therefrom
prophecies concerning us and the war.
Quoting scriptural passages he forecast when the first
American planes would roar overhead, when the war
would end and when we would be released. Our good-
natured jeers did not in the least perturb him when the
dates arrived without fulfillment of his predictions.
“I see where I made my mistake,” Pop would admit. “I
misread that passage in Revelations by six months. But I’m
sure of my interpretation now; we’ll be out of here in an-
other six months.”
Then he would quote the passage and explain his inter-
pretation. Another six months would pass and we would
remind Pop of his prophecy.
“How do we know the war hasn’t ended?” he would say.
“Fighting could be over months before we’d learn about
it in this backwater. Besides, it says in Revelations . . .”
And he would be off again on his favorite theme. All his
dates came and went eventlessly but Pop was never discour-
aged, nor his faith in his prophetical ability shaken. We
wished, as we buried him, that he still was around to proph-
esy. He was a good fellow, rotund, merry, fuss-budget Pop,
matron of the Palembang Jail dysentery ward, prophet and
perpetual optimist.
Pop’s only belongings when I met him were a small suit-
case— empty— a Bible, a cheap watch, a knitted green shawl
and the shirt and shorts he wore. When he died, the only
additions to his possessions were a few tins and coconut
shells. Almost all prisoners acquired belongings during their
internment but not Pop. He wanted nothing but to rule
his domain of bedpans. He ran it, until sickness relieved
him of the job, like a fussy old hen mothering a brood of
scabby chicks.
Although as ward matron Pop could have enjoyed the
prerogative of a wooden door for a bed, he preferred throw-
ing a rice sack on the cement floor and lying on it. Always
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barefoot, he never wore sandals despite frequently infected
feet. Another idiosyncrasy was a pretense of fasting one day
a week. He drew his food on that day ostensibly to give a
sick friend. While we ate he busied himself with hospital
tasks and all day reminded us he had not eaten. At night,
when he thought no one could see him, he ate. Next day
he would tell us how fit he felt despite twenty-four hours
without food.
Pop chattered incessantly. We got so the only times we
heard him were when he was suddenly silent; then, startled,
we would look around. Two things were possible. Either he
had fallen asleep or was studying his Bible for another
prophecy.
Pop actually worked only the first nine months of cap-
tivity. The rest of the time he was a patient. But he had
become a tradition, a part of our surroundings, a sort of
gossipy, flesh and blood family skeleton.
On his birthday in October 1943, I gave him a cigar for
which I had searched the prison. Beissel finally got it for
me from a guard. It was a rank, native-made cheroot but it
was the first one Pop had smoked in eight months and he
always said he preferred a cigar to a meal. The old boy was
as tickled by the fact some one remembered his birthday
as by the cheroot.
'"Mac," he said, "this cigar is so good Pll let you in on a
secret. I’ve been lying here re-interpreting the scriptures
and I have figured out exactly when the war will end. This
is an unqualified prophecy. You can write it down. Ger-
many will collapse between October 20th and November
yth. Japan will surrender just before Germany does.”
"You mean this year or next year?” I asked. “Tomorrow
is October 20th.”
"This year of 1943/’ Pop emphasized. "This very week.
At this very minute Germany may be seeking an armis-
tice.”
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He picked up his Bible.
“It says right here in the Book of Daniel, ‘Blessed is he
that waiteth and cometh to the thirteen hundred and
thirty-fifth day.’ Now their calendar in those days was
just a little off. Adjusting their calculations to what we
know now . . .”
“Wait a minute, Pop. What’s the Bible counting from?
Thirteen hundred and thirty-five days from what?”
“Munich, of course,”
“Munich? Is Munich in the Bible?”
“It says in the thirteenth chapter of Revelations: ‘And
power was given him to continue forty and two months.’
Now, my interpretation is that ‘him’ means England. Hit-
ler is the beast referred to earlier in the chapter and Japan
is the second beast. In other words, England at Munich
gave Hitler, the beast, power to continue for thirteen hun-
dred and thirty-five days.”
“Hold on, pal. Let me get this straight. Do you mean
that tomorrow, October 20th, 1943, is the thirteen hun-
dred and thirty-fifth day since Munich?”
“Not exactly, but you see, we have to make certain ad-
justments for the differences between the calendars of the
Old Testament and now. According to my calculations, this
week is the time meant. This very week! Of course, it will
take a few more weeks for the Allies to find us here and re-
lease us. You wait and see, Mac. We’ll be free in a couple
weeks.”
The weeks passed and the months, nine of them. Pop
became so heavy with liquid it required two men to lift
him so we could change the dripping mats beneath him
and put them in the sun to dry.
“You know, Mac,” he said in July 1944, “my calculations
were off on that thirteen hundred and thirty-fifth day.
I’ve been thinking it over and I’m positive it will come in
October this year. But I probably won’t see it. I won’t live
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that long. When your American friends come here in Oc-
tober to liberate the camp, say hello to them for me and
remember that I predicted the date.”
“I sure will. Pop, but you’ll be here when they come.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Of course I won’t. I know how
sick I am. And I’m quite ready to go.”
He died, in August 1944, just one year short of V-J Day.
Had his bulk been solid it would not have gone in the
narrow cofBn, but, like a massive sponge, it could be
squeezed here and expanded there to fit. Pallbearers in-
cluded his fellow workers, Kendall, who succeeded him as
matron. Doc West, Harrison, Thomson, Drysdale and
myself. Because the weight was so heavy we changed fre-
quently with our alternates during the march. The day was
hot; sweat poured from us so freely we hardly noticed that
some of the moisture which soaked our shoulders was not
perspiration but leaked from the coffin. Beri-beri sweat did
not stop even in death. We were glad to reach the
cemetery.
The last will and testament of handle-bar-moustached
cockney Herbert Smallwood, who had been my steadiest
monkey-pox customer, was among those “probated” in 1944.
I had drawn it up for him in 1942, when he waddled into
the clinic on a Sunday morning and expressed concern lest
“something happens to my estate if I croak in here.”
“Draft me something fancy,” he said, “so they’ll know
it’s a genuine will.”
So, mustering my stock of legal phrases, I drew up a will
containing an impressive number of whereases, wherefores
and to-wits. Smallwood had no relatives. He directed that
his estate go to a man in Canada who had befriended him
during his lumberjack days. In case the man could not
be found, the estate should go to a lady friend in Eng-
land.
“My friend in Canada has a youngster,” Smallwood said
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in his hoarse tenor. “This money may help put the kid
through school.”
Smallwood’s entire “estate” consisted of ten English
pounds in a Liverpool bank and whatever wages would
accrue to him from the Canadian Pacific Railroad Steam-
ship Line during the war. Small as the amount may sound
it was large to the ex-sailor-lumber jack-grocery-boy-roust-
about.
Often on moonlight nights we sat in the yard while he
smoked my tobacco, told me tall tales of his roistering life,
and speculated what he would do if he did not “croak” but
returned to England after the war.
On July 4, 1943, Smallwood wheezed into the Barracks
Camp clinic, saluted and began to sing with a voice similar
to a leaky barrel organ:
“Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so
proudly we hailed at the .... at the . . . . ta, ta, ta, ta,
ta . . . .”
“Sorry,” he said breathlessly, “I’ve forgotten what’s
next.”
He laughed until his eyes watered, his face purpled and
the spiked points of his moustache quivered as if in a high
wind.
When he had subsided enough to talk he explained fur-
ther,
“A cutie in Panama taught me the words and I thought
I’d never forget them. What a girl!”
He paused in appreciative memory, then continued,
“What I want to say is. Happy July the Fourth! And
here is something to remember me by.”
He handed me a sample-size cake of an American soap.
The following November Smallwood suffered a heart at-
tack in his block. Doc said he was too ill to be moved so
we left him in his bunk, where he had been stricken, until
he should either die or recover sufficiently to be brought
into hospital. After the initial spasm had passed he sent for
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me. He was in great pain, shaking violently and could
speak only with difficulty. He sounded as though he were
talking about wool socks but that made no sense. Finally
it was clear he did mean wool socks. His neighbors said he
had a pair. They might be outside drying. I found them and
brought them in. Smallwood motioned me to get beside
him on the bench. I stepped up. He seized my hands and
the socks, squeezed one of my hands over the top of one
of the socks. In the fabric I felt a ring.
“Yours,” he gasped. “Keep .... yours .... thanks.”
He had devised a clever hiding place for the ring, a small
plain gold band. The thick top of the socks had been un-
ravelled in one spot and reknitted with the ring inside.
Smallwood did not die as he feared he was going to. When
he recovered I returned the ring, despite his protestations
that I keep it.
Smallwood lived until March 29, 1944, when a funeral
cortege of thirty men followed his coffin to the cemetery.
We told the Japanese it was such a heavy load we needed
that many men to take turns carrying it.
Van Hutten's death in 1942 while trying to escape was
one of the most bizarre of our internment. Although it oc-
curred in Palembang Jail, I tell it here because it was so
spectacular.
About two o’clock in the morning of December 24,
1942, wild screams awakened me. The blood chilling
sounds, high and continuous, were like the cries of an in-
jured dog but worse because they were human. My first
thought was that someone had gone berserk and was killing
a fellow prisoner.
Throwing aside my mosquito net I jumped up and ran
into the yard to see in the starlight a Malay guard running
around in circles holding his head and screaming. Men
poured from their cells to converge on the front gates
which were being clanged shut by frantic guards.
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Shouts sounded from the street outside. Someone had
escaped.
The screaming guard was quieted and brought into the
clinic. He had a deep gash in his scalp. Doc West took sev-
eral stitches in the wound and we got the story.
Several days previously two Indo-European oil workers
from the Shell refinery at Pladjoe had been brought into
the jail and kept under constant surveillance in the guard
room between the inner and outer gates. Guards fre-
quently left open the outer gate. One of the prisoners,
named Van Hutten, asked to be taken to the lavatory
which was in the jail yard. A guard escorted him and left
open the inner gate. That meant both gates were open,
although other guards lounged on chairs between them.
In the lavatory Van Hutten jerked the bayonet from the
scabbard at the guard’s waist, felled him with a blow on the
head, dashed across the yard, through the inner gate, passed
two startled guards and charged through the outer gate to
freedom.
From there on Van Hutten’s course was less clear to us
and confused by conflicting reports. We heard that on the
street he cut down two Japanese soldiers, knocked a third
soldier off a bicycle, mounted the cycle himself, pedaled to
the Moesi river and, under a fusillade of shots from guards
on the river bank, jumped into the stream. He was not cap-
tured. Ten days later his fellow prisoner, named Buchanan,
was taken from the jail and shown the decomposed body
of a man found in the river. He identified it as Van Hutten.
The will to live was vital to survival. Given an even break
and a few extras, sick men who had courage and determina-
tion might fight their way back to health. Conversely, men
who lacked fighting spirit succumbed no matter what help
they obtained. Age had little or nothing to do with a man’s
will. The odds were heavily against elderly men surviving,
yet many did while young men died.
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During our early months in Palembang Jail an English-
man with dysentery, who had a better than even chance
of recovering, said he did not want to recover; he wanted
to die.
“I’ve lost everything,” he said, “the Japs cleaned me out.
It isn’t worth the struggle to start over.”
He practically willed himself into the grave by refusing
to try.
A British planter, as soon as he entered Muntok prison
hospital with malaria, made up his mind he was doomed.
“My doctor told me to avoid all serious illnesses because
of my heart,” said the planter. “This is a serious illness.”
“A headache is serious if you’re in that state of mind,”
he was told. “Snap out of it and eat your dinner.”
But he had no more spirit than a lump of clay. His mind
was set on dying, not because he wanted to but because he
thought it was inevitable, and so he died.
Deaths due to greed and folly were not uncommon. Dur-
ing the beri-beri scourge Doc West was informed that a
patient critically ill with beri-beri was selling Vitamin B
tablets. Vitamin B was what the sick man needed more
than anything else to save his life. Why was he selling the
tablets? Because he wanted money.
With commendable acumen the man had purchased his
store of Vitamin B before he was interned. He had saved
the tablets for an emergency but they commanded such
fabulous prices he decided instead to sell. Meanwhile, his
friends, who were giving him all the extra food they could
scrape up, also were buying back the tablets for him on the
black market, not knowing their source.
“Have you lost your mind?” Doc asked the greedy one.
“You are selling your life.”
“I didn’t realize I was that sick,” said the patient. “Be-
sides, I need the money.”
Doc took charge of the tablets and saw to it that the sick
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man swallowed the required number each day. But it was
too late. After his death a search of his clothing and mat-
tress disclosed an astonishing sum in hoarded guilders. He
died at the age of 29, victim of his own avarice.
Usurers who loaned money for repayment after the war
at fantastic interest rates did a thriving business. One of
the most enterprising and successful tradesmen and usurers
had a Robin Hood streak in him. He was satisfied with a
small profit on a trade with a comparatively poor man. By
indefatigable buying and selling on narrow profit margins,
he gradually cornered a large share of the market in nego-
tiable goods. Then he branched into food buying. Desti-
tute prisoners would sell meals in order to get cash for to-
bacco, a piece of black market fish or a vitamin tablet. The
meal would be resold to a rich man at a fat profit. The food
trader’s business became so big that he was able, for a
monthly retainer’s fee, to guarantee a certain number of
extra meals of rice per month to men willing to pay the
price. Having accumulated capital he became a big-time
money lender. His interest rates were as high as 1,000 per
cent on small loans and 500 per cent on big loans — repay-
ment after the war.
He amassed a small fortune in cash, goods and promis-
sory notes. He was well nourished and had every prospect
of surviving to enjoy his earnings. But he did not. Cerebral
malaria killed him. Money could not protect him against
mosquitoes or buy quinine when there was none for sale.
Sometimes a gay or gallant death is sadder than a quiet,
ordinary one.
Malaria, beri-beri and exhaustion were finishing a Dutch
seafaring man I’ll call The Trouper. Dr. Lentze gave The
Trouper a hypodermic injection and tried to cheer the
dying man. TTie injection had an exhilarating effect. The
Trouper suddenly sat up and laughed.
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“Don’t look so solemn,” he said to Dr Lentze and nearby
patients. “I know I’m going to die, but it doesn’t matter.
Cheer up. Let’s sing and laugh. Let’s smoke cigarets, lots
of cigarets. And let’s have a drink. By all means let’s have
a drink.”
He raised a bottle of cold tea to his lips and drank.
“We can pretend that’s gin.”
He lit a cigaret.
“We don’t have to pretend that’s a cigaret.”
He passed nipa leaves and tobacco to men on either side
of him. They, too, lit up and smoked.
“Now,” he said, “let’s sing.”
He sang rollicking Dutch tunes. His mind and voice
were clear as bells, clear and high pitched.
He sent for a friend. When the friend arrived The
Trouper told him:
“Please go to my wife and children after the war. Tell
them how happily I died. Tell them that I did not suffer
and that I laughed and sang and thought of them at the
end.”
The friend promised.
“Let’s have another cigaret,” said The Trouper.
The exertions had drained his strength. He lay back on
the mat but he continued to sing for nearly half an hour,
until, steadily sinking, he lapsed into a coma, his final sleep.
About eleven o’clock one night Attendant George Bry-
ant informed me a patient I’ll call Hals had asked for the
doctor, saying,
“I am dying.”
I notified Dr. Kramer, then went to the dysentery ward.
Stepping up on the bench I felt Hals’ pulse. No pulse. No
heart beat. No indication of breathing or other animation.
The eyes were open, staring, lifeless. Bryant stepped up on
the bench beside me, looked, said,
“My gosh, he’s gone already.”
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“Yes,” I agreed, looking intently into Hals’ blank eyes,
“he’s dead.”
Then a chill ran through me. The dead man’s head
rolled ever so slightly, in nearly imperceptible but distinct
and emphatic denial. His pulse was indistinguishable, he
was blind and mute, but he could hear and think!
“Do you want water?” I asked.
His head moved in negation.
Dr. Kramer arrived, examined Hals perfunctorily and de-
parted, saying,
“I can do nothing for him.”
Hals’ head moved. I had a feeling he wanted something
if I could only guess what. Speaking into his ear I said,
“I’ll ask questions. You nod yes or no.”
“Water?”
No.
“Position changed?”
No.
“Priest?”
Yes.
I walked across the concrete pendopo to the Tin Win-
ning’s other wing and awakened Father Van Thiel who
had given Hals Extreme Unction two days previously. He
squatted beside the dying man.
“This is Father Van Thiel. Can you hear me?”
A nod.
“I will pray aloud. You say the words after me in your
mind.”
About an hour later Hals’ pulse was perceptible. He
managed a wraith of a smile and spoke two words.
“Water finger.”
I dipped my finger in cold tea and moistened his lips
and tongue. A better idea occurred. I soaked a cloth in the
tea and squeezed drops into his mouth. He managed to
swallow. He was rallying but ever so slightly. I asked if he
wanted me to put the cloth in his mouth so he could suck
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it. He nodded yes. Later his eyes closed and he appeared to
sleep. I went to bed.
When the attendant on the following shift came on
duty Bryant warned him of our experience with Hals. Next
morning the attendant told us another episode in the
macabre drama. About three a.m. he carefully examined
Hals and, certain the man was dead beyond all doubt,
folded his arms over his breast, pulled a blanket over his
face and called the doctor.
The doctor came, found Hals still alive— and conscious!
Hals really died, according to the doctor’s stethoscope, at
four o’clock in the afternoon. But we did not bury him for
another twenty-four hours, just to make sure. I wonder
what were his thoughts when he heard me pronounce him
dead?
A few weeks later the same thing happened to another
patient in the dysentery ward. One of the priests was pre-
sumed dead by two fellow priests who were ward attend-
ants. They were looping a rag around his head to hold his
jaw shut, preparatory to encofhning him, when the “dead
man” blinked his eyes to signal he was still alive.
My observations convinced me that most men who are
aware death is approaehing, desire to be at peaee with God.
However, some do not want their friends to know it. Why?
Because their neighbors might think them weaklings, or
sentimental or afraid. A man I will call Crumpet was one
of these. He had been in and out of hospital for two years.
While I was dressing him one morning he asked, sotto
voee,
“Do you know some prayers? It looks like I might not
make it and I’d like to say a few.”
“Sure. Do you remember the Lord’s Prayer?”
“Va^ely.”
I said the Lord's Prayer slowly, sentence by sentence.
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and he repeated it after me. Soon he knew it again as well
as when he had learned it in childhood. As I left him to con-
tinue my dressing rounds, he said,
“Don't tell any one, will you?"
“Of course not."
“Can you come back and see me after roll call?"
“Sure."
That night, in undertones, we discussed religion and
man's obligations to his Creator. Crumpet talked freely be-
cause he was confident no one but me could hear him. He
lay on one end of the bench, next to the wall. The two men
nearest him on the other side were in comas. Therefore, he
felt secure in talking unheard. He admonished me again
to say nothing.
“They would think it was queer if they knew," he ex-
plained. “And it's none of their business."
“They" was a vague reference to his friends. I suggested
that he talk either to one of the Protestant laymen who led
English church services— Anglican minister Wardle had
died— or to one of the Catholic priests who would be more
qualified than I to counsel him.
“No," said Crumpet. “People might think I was getting
soft. But you might ask the fathers to pray for me."
I tried to fathom his reluctance to disclose he believed in
God and was worried about the hereafter. What did his
neighbors' thoughts matter to him, a dying man? His rea-
sons reduced to the concern he felt for what his friends
would think if, after a lifetime of ignoring religion, he sud-
denly should start to pray. The friends about whom
Crumpet was so anxious were so little concerned about
him that they did not even attend his funeral.
Wembley-Smythe was brought into hospital, for the last
time, exhausted from hunger and malaria. Obviously, he
was doomed. Just as obviously he didn't realize it. He was
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surrounded by the same conspiracy of silence that sur-
rounds most dying men— unless they expressly desire to
know for religious or other reasons.
The conspiracy of silence is based on the theory that in-
forming him he is dying could only frighten or panic a
man. I think it panics only those who have little faith. As
far as I could tell by observation, the knowledge they were
dying did not frighten those who were informed of it so
they could receive the last sacraments of their Church or
who, like Old Pop, knew instinctively their condition and
accepted it.
Contrary to frightening them. Extreme Unction ap-
peared to give dying men spiritual ammunition that bright-
ened their eyes and in many cases gave them new physical
strength. More than a few who were anointed recovered
instead of dying.
Wembley-Smythe, like many another, once remarked he
hoped that when his time came it would come so quickly
he would know nothing about it. His wish was partially ful-
filled in that he had no idea how sick he was. He drifted
into a coma the second morning after his arrival. That
night about ten o’clock I crouched beside him on the
bench and, as I counted his waning pulse, he died.
The Hollander lying next to him began to cry. He and
Wembley-Smythe and I had been good friends. To him,
as to me, Wembley-Smythe’s story was the story of most of
the British community. Shipwrecked, penniless, inept at
caring for himself, with never a cent except occasional in-
finitesimal loans, uncomplaining, cheerful, cultured, tol-
erant, and a strange mixture of agnosticism and Sunday
church going.
His body was so emaciated the ward attendant and I had
no difficulty lifting it onto a stretcher and carrying it to the
mortuary. There were several coffins waiting. We opened
one but it already was occupied.
The occupant gazed blankly up at us, his cold eyes re-
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fleeting the light of the kerosene lamp. We replaeed the
lid and opened another box. It, too, was oecupied.
“Damn,” we exploded simultaneously. “The empties
are on the bottom.”
Four coffins were in the mortuary, stacked in twos, and
the attendants who carried out the previous two bodies had
not switched the bottom empties to the top. We carried
Wembley-Smythe back outside, got additional help to lift
the full boxes off the empties and finally put him into one.
As we encoffined him I thought of the discussion
Wembley-Smythe and I had the night of a moonlit thun-
derstorm in Barracks Camp. He had expressed doubt there
was a hereafter for the souls of men and jokingly remarked
how dreadfully boring it would be if eternity were one long
black-out and he was compelled to be aware of it.
I bade Wembley-Smythe a silent goodbye as I closed the
lid and wondered if, wherever his spirit might be, he was
bored.
When all the chips are in and the showdown is against
him, a man has only his spiritual reservoir on which to
draw. If that treasury of the soul is empty he has only one
companion— that most dreadful of enemies: Despair. Spir-
itual bankruptcy affects men in different ways. It causes
some to seek Death because they fear Life. It causes others
to fear Death with a fear that is stark and terrible.
A man I will call Hamilcar was one of those who in his
old age could not face new hazards and so sought Death.
Another man I will call The Cynic was one of those for
whom Death meant terror immeasurable.
Hamilcar's passing I call the Death of the Wild Goat
because he was more than the family black sheep. He had
been a wild, black goat if even half the stories told of him
were true. He was a magnificent old boy who barehanded
would fight a wild cat, but who could not live with himself.
Tall, slender, white-haired, hawk-nosed and 70, he first
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aroused my interest in the garden of Charitas hospital
where I saw him catching sparrows.
“Keeps me from going crazy/’ he explained, “and be-
sides, I need the meat.”
His technique was simple but called for adroitness and
a patience he could command only for short, intense peri-
ods while stalking prey. He held one end of a long string.
The other end was a running loop lying on the ground and
filled with grains of rice. When a bird hopped into the
loop he jerked the string, lassoing it by the leg.
All his life Hamilcar had successfully stalked things, ad-
venture, battle, roistering fun, fortune. He ran away to sea
when a boy, prospected for gold and tin and fished for
pearls in the tropics and sub-tropics. He fought in the Boer
War and in World War I, winning decorations for gal-
lantry in action and distinguished service as a commanding
officer. Returning after the wars to the tropics he struck it
rich in tin mining, rapidly won and lost two fortunes and
was in the midst of accumulating and spending his third
and largest when the Japanese interrupted.
Hamilcar’s idiosyncrasies were notorious. While in town
from his mines, men who knew him well told me, he vis-
isted as many clubs and bars as possible in one evening,
using a different ricksha for each journey but not paying
off any of the pullers. However, the pullers did not mind.
They knew Hamilcar and what was coming. The evening’s
climax occurred when he returned to his hotel with a
dozen rickshas trailing behind. Dismissing his last puller
Hamilcar would mount the hotel steps, pause at the top,
throw handfuls of currency into the air and howl with
laughter at the ensuing scramble.
Hamilcar never notified his cook in advance of dinner
guests until the guests arrived, whereupon he would point a
loaded revolver skyward and pull the trigger. One shot for
each guest. The listening cook prepared accordingly.
Bird catching and other activities occupied Hamilcar’s
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daylight hours in Charitas but when everyone else had gone
to sleep his private hell began. He could not sleep. There
was no one with whom he might talk. He could not walk
around in the garden, nor could he he still in bed. He had
to be moving. So he would go into a bathroom, lock the
door and pace up and down its twelve foot length. He
paced, not by striding but by placing one foot exactly in
front of the other, heel to toe, like a man measuring dis-
tance with his feet.
“That's how I keep from going crazy at night," he ex-
plained.
Confinement was his nemesis. He lived in dread of being
returned to jail. He said he would kill himself if he had to
go back. Because of his age and ailments he remained in
Charitas until it was closed, then he had to return. Soon
after arriving in Muntok Prison he tried to make good his
threat. Matron Kendall caught Hamilcar trying to hang
himself. After that we watched him but one night he fooled
the watcher. He rose from his mat on the hospital bench
and stood up. His six feet of lean frame towered in the flick-
ering light from the oil lamp. The attendant thought Hamil-
car was standing at the foot of the bench preparatory to
stepping down. But he was not. He dove head first onto the
concrete floor.
The impact did not kill him as he hoped, nor even knock
him out. But it sliced his scalp and was such a severe shock
he was finished physically. He lay for three days begging for
a shot of dope to quiet his nerves. Death finally quieted
them.
Suicide attempts were rare throughout internment. Only
two besides Hamilcar came close to success. One man
slashed his wrist as he lay in bed. He planned to bleed to
death quietly but neighbors noticed the blood and a tourni-
quet saved him.
Another man stabbed himself in the chest, but instead of
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piercing his heart inflicted only a minor flesh wound. How-
ever, he nearly died of shock. Doc West had a few ampules
of adrenalin. They brought the man out of his shock after
a nip and tuck period of thirty minutes.
Threats of a would-be suicide caused us to guard another
internee day and night for months. Finally a watcher, tiring
of his vigil, said:
‘‘I’m going to bed and I hope you kill yourself while I’m
gone because you’re nothing but a damn nuisance.”
Next morning the nuisance complained to the Camp
Committee that he was being improperly guarded. No one
guarded him after his bluff was called; but, like the man
who stabbed himself, he died later of “natural” causes at the
age of 38.
The Cynic displayed abject terror at its worst. I call him
The Cynic because he had been an habitual scoffer. But
when Death looked him in the eye The Cynic collapsed in
a heap of howls and tears. He was in strong voice when he
was carried into hospital and the voice continued strong
until the end, two days later. Such fear I have never seen.
Over and over he cried out:
“I’m dying. I’m dying. Don’t let me go. Hold on to me.
Don’t let me go. Hold my hands.”
He screamed for Dr. Hollweg and when Hollweg arrived
cried,
“Pull me back. I’m sinking down the long tunnel. Pull
me back. Stay here. You are going farther away. You are
fading away. Save me. Save me. Don’t let me die. Hold on
to me. Pull me back.”
The Cynic clung to Hollweg with a grip of frenzy. For
a man who was dying he had uncommon strength. His mind
was clear. He talked and answered questions rationally.
There was no question of delirium or insanity. It was sheer
terror. The be-all and the end-all of The Cynic’s life had
been his own egotism. But it would not succor him when he
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was about to embark on a voyage into the unknown. So he
screamed for his friends to pull him back from the edge of
the abyss. For him life had been completely material and
now at the end material assistance was all he could under-
stand. To ask God’s help in his travail did not occur to him.
He could only ask Hollweg, ‘‘Hang on to me. Don’t let
me go!”
Finally, for the sake of other patients and our own frayed
nerves, it was necessary to quiet him with an ampule of the
rapidly dwindling and precious stock of morphine Doc-
West reserved only for men suffering intense pain. The
Cynic was moved into my “Bedroom & Morgue” where an
attendant remained constantly beside him. During his last
twenty-four hours of life The Cynic repeated endlessly, over
and over again, like a broken phonograph record, a strange
monologue. In Dutch the words had a certain rhyme and
cadence. The nearest English translation is:
There is a village.
There is a woman in the village.
The sun comes up over the woman in the village.
The sun goes down over the village.
God goes down over the village.
The woman leaves the village.
The village is gone.
Goodbye village.
Goodbye woman.
Goodbye sun.
Goodbye God.
Hour after hour The Cynic’s deep voice repeated those
words. The only variation was in volume. As he weakened
his voice weakened, faded to a mutter, then to a snore.
Finally it ceased with The Cynic’s heart.
The Cynic’s opposite number for gameness was a jovial
salesman, likeable, big hearted and courageous. Hard luck
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had dogged him from his first day in Palembang Jail. He
had been one of my early “Palembang Bottom” customers.
Monkey-pox, boils, hernia, a lame knee, fever, dysentery
and finally beri-beri had plagued him. He smiled through
them all. The flesh of his legs was unbelievably distended,
taut as a drum skin and excruciatingly painful. Wet com-
presses brought a little relief so I kept his legs wrapped in
damp rags. While I changed the rags one morning as the
salesman hovered on the border of semi-consciousness, his
mind came alive. His lips writhed in the too-familiar, open
mouthed, ghastly beri-beri smile. He grasped my hand and
startled me by saying,
“Oh Mac, what a fool I’ve been.”
And died.
The difference spiritual reserves make was illustrated by
two men who lay side by side in the dysentery ward. One
was an oil technician in the prime of life. His friends lav-
ished their resources on him. The other was a 6oyear-old
tin miner whose friends had nothing. But the miner had a
courage and shining faith which the technician completely
lacked.
Hiccuping was a nearly infallible symptom that a dysen-
tery patient was dying. Although his heart might be strong
he usually was doomed once he began to hiccup.
The miner got hiccups and was in great distress but he
was game. He knew he was doomed but he insisted on help-
ing himself as much as possible and he even managed a
smile or joke between hiccups.
Buoyed by extra nourishment and the encouragement of
his friends, the technician put up a good fight until his
first hiccup. Then he quit and begged for an injection to
end his life.
“Put me to sleep,” he whined. “Let me die. What have
I done to deserve this?”
The will is like a dam holding back the waters of Lethe.
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When the will is gone, the flood sweeps in, drowning the
life too tired to fight. Forty-eight hours after his abject sur-
render the technician died, whining to the last.
The miner had no prosperous friends but he had a well
of inner strength on which he drew and with which he
fought to the last. He received the last rites of his faith and
died serenely.
The technician, with no spiritual reserves, lacked the
most essential thing of all.
Vincent Mitbo, 59, a Norwegian and, until jailed, the
director of the Salvation Army leprosarium near Palem-
bang, died November 19, 1944, ending a lifetime of service
for his fellow man.
Only one other man in prison knew the Salvation Army
funeral ritual: Oom Piet (Uncle Peter) Rolffs, who had
been director of an orphanage in a south Sumatra Indo-
European colony and once a Salvation Army man himself.
Oom Piet was seriously ill in the septic ward. He had not
walked for weeks but, summoning a strength which was
not there until his will created it, he rose from his bench
and, supported by two friends, walked down the long flight
of steps to the pendopo where Mitbo’s coffin rested on two
sawhorses.
Oom Piet leaned against the coffin, bracing himself with
his hands, and recited what prayers he could remember of
the formal service. Then, still leaning on the coffin, he sang
the Dutch version of “Onward Christian Soldiers." His
voice was little more than a high, quavering rasp. He had
to pause for breath between bars. To me the words were
in an unfamiliar tongue but he sang them unforgettably.
It was the first time “Onward Christian Soldiers" had meant
anything more to me than a street corner band and a
woman in blue passing a tambourine.
Oom Piet finished and was helped back to the septic
ward. He was exhausted, trembling with feverish warnings
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that his exertions had brought on another attack of the re-
current erysipelas which plagued him. But he was happy in
the knowledge that he had made possible a proper funeral
for his friend who had been a real soldier of the Lord.
Of the dead Mitbo, keeper of lepers, and the dying Oom
Piet, keeper of orphans, I thought could be written those
words spoken some nineteen hundred years ago:
“ 'Amen I say to you, as long as you did it for one of
these, the least of my brethren, you did it for me.’ ’’
On December 4, 1944, Father Bakker was assisted from
his sick bed to lead the choir in a special song at the funeral
of Oom Piet.
Like other men of deep faith, whether lay or clerical, a
New Zealand tin miner named Enright and a Dutch brother
named Richardus, of the Order of Our Lady of Lourdes,
accepted death with a quiet smile. Tliey were secure in the
belief that beyond the grave eternal life awaited them.
Enright, who attended Mass every morning before falling
sick, told me while I was dressing his beri-beri leg,
"Mac, be sure and give me ample warning if ever I’m
in danger of death. I want to know.”
I told Doc West of Enright’s wishes. A few days later
Doc said,
"You can tell him now. He won’t last much longer.”
So I told him.
"Very well,” said Enright, as matter-of-factly as if he were
discussing the weather. "Ask Father Filing to come and
give me Extreme Unction. I’m quite ready to go.”
Father Filing came. Later in the day I asked Enright if
he wished any ointment for his itch. Ointment was scarce,
as Enright knew.
"No thanks,” he whispered, "give it to some one else.”
He managed another whisper and a smile.
"I have only a little longer to itch.”
He died that night.
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Brother Richardus died with a quiet joke in the dysentery
ward which stank indescribably because we were short-
handed and in the midst of an epidemic. He had received
Extreme Unction days before and cheerfully was waiting
for death to relieve him of his suffering.
It happened to be the durian season when those heavy
fruits ripened and dropped from the tall spreading trees
which bore them. Durians are as large as coconuts and
have a similar protective husk. The edible fruit inside is a
creamy substance delicious in flavor but stronger in odor
than overripe limburger. Because of its fetid scent the durian
is sometimes called civet fruit.
As was my custom after dressing the patients who ob-
viously needed it, I asked other patients, by turn, if I could
do anything for them.
A grin creased the death’s head that was Brother Rich-
ardus’ face. His voice was a hoarse whisper but it could still
make a joke.
“What will you do for me?”
“Anything I can. Brother.”
“Then bring me a durian so I can smell its perfume.”
“Okay,” I said, “if you’ll only smell it and let me eat it.”
“We will divide it,” said Brother Richardus, laughing
soundlessly, “so I can tell St. Peter how good it tastes. I
think he never ate a durian.”
Half an hour later Brother Richardus was in St. Peter’s
realm.
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Christmas Comes Again
T his is where we came in, nineteen chapters ago
when this story began with old Brinker dying in
Muntok Prison hospital the night of December
24, 1944 choir sang Christmas carols.
After encofhning Brinker I returned to the staff room
where Eric gave me a Christmas present, an American
cigaret he had saved from the Red Cross issue in October.
I smoked it and occupied the time until sleep came thinking
that the events of this Christmas of 1944 furnished a key to
the whole story of our prison life and its struggles which
were trying the souls of men.
Old Brinker had lost the battle for his life but, as he re-
marked to Father Bakker several days before, he wasn’t
worrying because he believed he had saved his soul. In these
surroundings, at this time and place, Brinker ’s passing had
been somber, yes, but not a tragedy. Rather, it had been a
happy passage. He was ready to go; he had returned to his
faith after thirty years away and his heart was at peace.
That was why he could crack his last joke when I told him
the choir would sing in time for him to hear them.
'‘Good,” he had said, “then I’ll be able to compare them
with the angels.”
Perhaps Death had been a welcome Christmas visitor to
old Brinker.
Thinking those thoughts I fell asleep. When I awakened
Christmas morning I remembered how I had opened my
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eyes just one year before, in 1943, from the long blackout
of cerebral malaria, to see Father Elling looking down at me
and hear him saying, '‘Merry Christmas/’
“Now to reverse the proceedings,’’ I said to myself.
Rising, I slipped my toes into a pair of terompaks and
clumped into the fever ward where Father Elling lay re-
cuperating from a siege of malaria and dysentery which had
nearly finished him. He had been one of the fifteen clergy-
men who volunteered to man the dysentery and septic
wards. Three of them were now dead— of dysentery— and
eleven were sick. Father Elling had fooled us by throwing
off the dysentery but chronic malaria still slowed his recov-
ery. I stepped up on the bench, looked down at him and
said,
“Merry Christmas, pal. The tables are now turned.”
He laughed weakly, shook hands and said, “Completely
turned, and the same to you.”
Then I walked across the pendopo to the Pangkal Pinang
block where Father Bakker lived. Last night he had been
too wracked with fever to lead his beloved choir. This morn-
ing the fever had subsided and he was dragging himself
around getting ready to say Mass.
“Merry Christmas, Mac,” he said. “Next year I hope you
will be at home for Christmas.”
After Mass I stood at the front gate with a host of others
seeing Bishop Mekkelholt off to visit the Women’s Camp.
It was the first and the last time any internee from Muntok
Prison was permitted to visit the women and every man
rejoiced that now, after a year and three months, we would
learn something of their condition.
Bishop Mekkelholt, wearing his episcopal robes as he
waited for the gate to be opened, was a strange contrast to
the everyday Bishop Mekkelholt we were accustomed to
seeing, wearing a pair of shorts and a pajama jacket and
squatting over a tiny fireplace cooking kachang ijau soup
for his sick priests.
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He returned in two hours with cheering news. Although
not permitted to converse with the women he was allowed
to preach a sermon. His eyes had been busy and the nuns
who sang the responses to the High Mass he celebrated had
managed to convey him some information too.
He said the women looked in better health than we men.
Their camp, of seven wooden barracks and a hall open on
the sides, was set on a hill about 300 feet above sea level, in
a healthier location than our miasmic one. He believed their
mortality rate would be lower than ours. Seki give him a few'
statistics. In the Women’s Camp that Christmas day were
696 persons, of whom 160 were children and 83 were nuns.
Approximately 350 attended Mass, many in tears. Tlieir
choir, the same one that had serenaded our working party
from afar Christmas Day, 1942, sang carols.
Old Brinker and another man were buried Christmas
afternoon. The double funeral did not dampen our limited
celebration. Funerals were too commonplace to affect our
morale. Already it was about as low as it could go. But our
spirits were raised temporarily by 100 grams (3V2 ounces)
of pork sauce on our rice and three cups of coffee, one in the
morning, one at noon and one at night. The pork was from
our own pig. We had been raising pigs— feeding them our-
selves— ever since arriving in Muntok but this was the first
time Seki had allowed us to kill one. Not even news could
help morale like pork sauce and coffee.
TTie food situation was becoming grimmer. Rations had
shrunk another 15 per cent. Although there had been no
announcement of reduction, a shrinkage was evident. Our
kitchen staff could estimate to an ounce.
A dog somehow got into the Tin Winning yard the night
of December 28th. Dr. Kampschuur and a friend were the
closest. They seized and killed it in a trice and soon were
cooking canine stew.
Although rations diminished, Seki’s attitude toward us
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improved. On January 1, 1945, he gave us our third pleasant
surprise in a month. The first had been allowing Dr. Lentze
to be taken to a Japanese hospital on the other side of
Bangka Island for an emergency appendectomy. The second
had been allowing Bishop Mekkelholt to visit the Women's
Camp. The third, New Year's day, was a general distribu-
tion of Japanese cigarets and the gift of two wild pigs,
caught by natives and bought by Seki. The pigs together
weighed 200 kilograms (440 pounds) . We divided the meat
equally and asked Seki to take half to the Women's Camp,
which he did.
Seki surprised us still further by unexpectedly taking an
interest in a hospital patient, G. J. Geursens, former man-
ager of the Bangka Tin Gompany, who lay critically ill in
the dysentery ward. Daily for two weeks Seki sent three
eggs, three bananas and a cup of kachang ijau soup to
Geursens. A patient alongside Geursens died cursing Seki
for not bringing food for other sick men too.
Seki's interest in Geursens was at the request of the Japa-
nese doctor Hasegawa who operated on Dr. Lentze and
brought him back from Muntok. Hasegawa said he acted at
behest of Japanese officials who were trying to operate the
tin company. Geursens disappointed them by dying.
On January 9th Seki allowed a few boys under sixteen to
go to the Women's Gamp and talk for five minutes with
their mothers.
A few days later Seki furnished the hospital with large
mosquito nets which he said would accommodate “eight
Japanese soldiers or twelve internees."
January 11, 1945, Eric and I received our first mail from
home. Some British mail had been received previously. Let-
ters from our mothers disclosed they had received at Christ-
mas time, 1943, the cards we wrote in March 1943. We
hoped they knew we still were alive. We hoped, too, that
atrocity stories concerning prisoners of war were not being
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published in America and adding to their worries. (After
the war I learned atrocity stories had been widely published
because they stimulated war bond drives. )
A clue to Seki's changing attitude was furnished by the
Chinese food contractor who, for the first time since he had
done business with us, opened his mouth on other than
business matters and muttered to a worker unloading
rations,
“War soon finished.”
That was in January, 1945. The war couldn't finish too
soon. Blackwater fever, a complication of chronic malaria,
had appeared among us. My own health, which had been
buoyed in November by the powdered milk and change of
jobs to lighter duties, was slipping again. My knees were too
shaky for even lighter duties and intestinal troubles were
plaguing me. Lentze ordered me to bed, and onto the
dreaded diet of all intestinal patients— soft rice porridge. It
was a necessary cure but contained little nourishment except
starch. If prolonged, the diet inevitably resulted in beri-
beri.
Wrapped around some bean curd cakes delivered to the
hospital by the contractor were several Malay newspapers.
They disclosed that American forces had landed in the
Philippines the previous October and that Germany was
crumbling. One of the newspapers said that the battle for
Leyte would decide the fate of the Pacific war but that there
was no question who would win it: Nippon. Enroute to
the cemetery next day pallbearers saw a public notice posted
in the street. It exhorted natives to help the Japanese defend
Indonesia against white invaders.
Piet van der Bergh, a kitchen worker, rushed to the staff
room where I lay to tell me the news. Joyously I offered to
bet twenty-five guilders— for repayment after the war be-
cause I was flat broke— that we would be free by June. Piet
was more pessimistic and took the bet, saying,
“That’s too soon.”
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January 17th Oosten resigned from the Camp Committee
because of ill health.
January 29th died New Zealander Burt, who had been
the guinea pig for our Palembang Bottom experiments.
Physically, he had been one of the toughest internees. He
had studied Spanish and learned to play the guitar so he
could surprise his wife when he got home.
Just before fleeing Singapore he had been notified of his
decoration with the Order of the British Empire for his
services with the engineering corps.
“They’ll probably send it to my wife to keep for me,” he
said. “Boy, won’t that be a great day when I get home!”
February 4th died our poet laureate Curran-Sharp who
had composed the Ode to Phoebus and had entertained at
early concerts with verses concerning Palembang Jail per-
sonalities. Curran-Sharp lost interest in life when he was
notified by the Japanese that his wife had died in the Wo-
men’s Camp. She had been the woman caught smuggling
letters into Charitas Hospital. However, there was no con-
nection between that episode and her death. When or how
she died he did not know. Only that she was dead. From
that day he began to fade.
Curran-Sharp left a sealed will to be opened after the war.
In 1947 his friends Doc West and Oosten received small
cash legacies from Curran-Sharp’s estate “in gratitude for
your help and friendship during internment and to buy
some small memento of me.”
February 5th Dr. Lentze diagnosed my latest troubles as
intestinal malaria.
February 7th Direct Action Drysdale finally won an elec-
tion, defeating Hammet and becoming British Leader. Van
Asbeck succeeded Oosten as chairman of the Camp Com-
mittee.
February 10th Lentze said my insides were getting worse.
February 11th occurred our second death from that stalk-
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ing horse of malaria, blackwater fever. The victim was only
21 years old.
February 12th I awakened to that dreadful S5onbol of
starvation: swollen feet.
Lentze redoubled his efforts to save me from the toboggan
slide into the dysentery or beri-beri wards. He had returned
from the Japanese hospital with a bottle of cod liver oil
malt to use for his own convalescence. He gave me what
remained in the bottle. He found a man willing to sell a
bottle of a native herb called seri awan, a specific against
dysentery. The seller wanted fifteen guilders. I was broke.
Bishop Mekkelholt loaned me the guilders.
February 13th Seki announced we would be moved
from Muntok Prison back to Sumatra. Patients in danger
of death enroute could remain behind with a doctor and a
few ward attendants until they either died or recovered
sufficiently to join us. Among those who were left behind
and who died was the nephew of Boris Karloff, D. F.
Pratt, who had been master of ceremonies at many jail
shows.
February 19th Doctors Kramer and Kampschuur, who
with Hollweg had headed the opposition in the November
hospital fight, returned to power and notified seven hospital
staff members including myself that, on the grounds of
physical unfitness, we were through as hospital workers.
February 26th moving began. Prisoners were divided into
three groups for transportation purposes. I went in the
second group, March 5th.
Dr. Lentze elected to remain with the patients too sick
to be transported. He chose Engineer Harrison and a few
Dutch ward attendants who also had volunteered, to remain
and help him.
Just before my group left I walked into the fever ward to
say goodbye to my old friend Colijn, who was among those
too sick to be moved. He had been in the lifeboat which
picked me out of the Indian Ocean. Later, with his three
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daughters, we had hiked along the Sumatra coast looking
for a boat in which to escape again.
“How much longer will it be, Mac?" he asked, meaning
the war.
I said my bets were on June.
“That will be too long for my strength, Tm afraid," he
said.
It was the first time I had ever heard him admit discour-
agement. But his next words were more cheerful.
“We will have some big dinners together in America
after the war," he said, managing a smile.
“We sure will," I replied, knowing we never would. He
knew it too.
Tired as he was he reached out to shake hands.
“We've been through a lot together, Mac." ^
I remembered well. In my mind's eye I saw him again,
taking a turn at the lifeboat tiller and later, hiking along
the beach and through the jungle, outwalking a boastful
native guide who had tried to exhaust him. I thought of his
escape from the Japanese after he and his wife were cap-
tured at Tarakan and of the dreams we both had shared for
escaping again. Now it was the end of the trail.
“Goodbye, Mac," he said.
“Goodbye, Mr. Golijn."
We shook hands. I turned and walked out of the ward.
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Belalau
S OMEWHERE enroute to our new prison camp
I became the party of the second part to a new
lease on life. Doing everything I should not have
done cured me. Under no circumstances was I supposed to
eat anything except soft rice. But soft rice was not avail-
able. I ate whatever came to hand. I was not to walk but I
walked and toted a heavy knapsack. When our destination
was reached my intestinal troubles had disappeared. Thanks
to efforts of Doc Lentze and other friends I was apparently
on the road to recovery and needed only one final push to
effect a cure. The trip did it. From then on rice porridge was
only a bad dream. I could eat anything and did, even the
heart of a banana tree. I was rarin’ for action. It came.
The journey from Muntok Prison verged on the night-
marish. My group numbered 250 men of whom twent}'-
five were stretcher cases and many more walking cadavers.
Midafternoon of March 5th we were stuffed, baggage and
all, into the holds of a small ship and the hatches were
closed. Except for the stretcher patients we stood or
crouched or sprawled on top of each other and our luggage.
In the packed, suffocating darkness I understood what
the Black Hole of Calcutta must have been like. The ship
lay in harbor all night. In small groups and for brief periods
we were permitted on deck, then herded below again. For-
tunately the voyage was short. We docked that night at
Palembang and were loaded into a waiting train of four
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coaches and a freight car. Windows and doors were sealed
and blinds drawn so we could neither see outside nor be
seen. The wooden seats were hard, the floors harder, the
darkness hot and airless, but it was better than the ship’s
hold. Next morning the train chugged from the yards and
halted at the end of the line twelve hours later. Instead of
being detrained we spent another night in the cars and at
dawn were unloaded and herded into a fenced enclosure
near the railroad depot.
End of the line was a little town named Loeboek Linggau
in the jungle-clad foothills of Sumatra’s west coast moun-
tains. Across the mountain range, on the sea side, I had
been captured three years before, in April 1942. In pre-war
days Loeboek Linggau had been one of the debarkation
points for thousands of Javanese farmer colonists, brought
from their homes in over-populated Java to clear jungles
and establish settlements in under-populated Sumatra.
For Resident Oranje our arrival in Loeboek Linggau was
particularly ironic. At exactly the same spot and in circum-
stances strikingly similar but in reverse, he, as a representa-
tive of the Dutch Government of Sumatra, often had
greeted trainloads of Javanese colonists.
“They arrived here just as we,” Oranje told me, “crowded
into third-class coaches; tired, dirty and loaded with tacky
baggage.”
Now Oranje himself was one of a group of ragged, dirty,
tired, heavy-laden men debarking from jam-packed railroad
cars to be greeted by Sumatra’s new guardians, the Japanese.
“Mac,” said Oranje with a doleful smile, “the Japs are
treating us worse than if we were Javanese coolies!”
I think he missed the full irony of his words.
A convoy of trucks carried us over a winding gravel road
from Loeboek Linggau. The road was little more than a
.swath between jungle and rubber trees. Occasionally the
jungle fell away at a clearing and mountain peaks were
visible in the distance. The clearings were areas where trees
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had been felled and burned by Javanese fanner colonists
and the land planted with maize, rice, beans, papaya, ba-
nana and the ubiquitous ubi kayu. The other side of the
road was a solid phalanx of rubber trees, tall, slender, stand-
ing in silent ranks that stretched into the perpetual twilight
of the rubber forest. Undergrowth choked their feet.
About twelve kilometers (7 Vi miles) from Loeboek
Linggau the trucks turned into the rubber, followed a wind-
ing trail through the trees for perhaps another four or five
kilometers, emerged into sunshine at a large clearing and
stopped.
In the clearing were a few low wooden buildings with
galvanized iron roofs. The inevitable barbed wire fence en-
circled the area and a stream flowed through it, the fence
spanning the stream. At the fence gate was a guardroom and
up a small hill above the road and outside the fence was a
building containing Seki’s headquarters. The fence was the
only new thing about the place. The buildings had been
accommodations for estate laborers and their families and
were known as coolie lines.
The coolie lines became our new camp, named after the
rubber estate, Belalau. Doctors warned us not to walk bare-
foot because the area was infested with hookworm. At first
we observed the warning but mud tore terompaks from our
feet so frequently we were involuntarily barefoot much of
the time.
Our water came from the dirty creek and a well sunk
beside it and had to be boiled. The stream also was our only
bathing facility. There was not enough fuel for lamps except
those burning in hospital. A few men, hungry for light at
night, made firefly lamps by catching and imprisoning the
insects in bottles. Others tapped rubber trees for latex and
burned the substance but it made more smoke than flame
and soon was abandoned.
The women followed us to the rubber estate in April and
were installed in similar coolie lines about two or three kilo-
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meters from our camp. As in Muntok there was no com-
munication between us and it was not until after the war
we heard the horrors of their trip.
Like us they were moved in three groups and packed in
the ship’s hold. A severe storm increased their misery.
Antoinette Colijn, who occupied a stretcher herself, said
nuns had to lie across the stretcher patients to keep them
from being thrown out of their crude beds. Five women
patients died in her freight car on the train trip from Palem-
bang to Loeboek Linggau.
The women could have left their most critically ill be-
hind to be nursed by a woman doctor— they had four— and
volunteers, as we did, but, mistrusting the Japanese, they
chose to take all their sick.
Life in Belalau was like camping out. The buildings were
so vermin-ridden and hot we spent most of our time out-
doors, prowling for things to eat and wood to cook them.
We were able to supplement our Japanese issued rations
with an astonishing variety of self-gathered food. Under-
growth teeming with edible leaves, vines and berries choked
the clearing. The banana trees were barren, having produced
their one and only yield. We felled the trees, stripped off
outer bark and laid bare the heart, a soft, sweet, fibrous,
white stalk, that can be eaten when diced and boiled. It
contains no nourishment but is filling.
Banana leaves are not edible but have an astonishing
variety of uses. They serve as umbrellas in a rain storm and
as wrappers for packages. They make excellent food con-
tainers and also can be used to line cooking vessels. Dried
and cut up they become cigaret papers and shredded they
can be mixed with tobacco to stretch it out. Ribs of the
leaves can be used as makeshift spoons or woven into
baskets.
In a few weeks, of course, our camp was stripped bare
of its edible foliage. Gardens then were dug and planted
with ubi, maize, chili peppers and quick growing, leafy
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plants. Next source of food was the creek but it was soon
fished, then seined, then scraped empty of stream life.
The health of nearly all prisoners, except those too far
gone for saving, improved almost magically. Men were
cheerful and optimistic in contrast with their former gloom
and pessimism. Part of the uplift was psychological. No
longer were we behind walls. Around us were green trees
and unparalleled opportunity for black marketing with
Haihos at night along the fence. Their prices were fantastic
but, pirates though they were, they brought rice, maize and
beans to trade for our clothing, jewelry, watches or fountain
pens.
After three years of imprisonment it was surprising that
men had anything left to trade. Many who had been wear-
ing rags and walking barefoot produced brand new shirts
and trousers that had never been worn.
The Japanese paid no attention to what we did inside
the barricades. The camp was dotted with private fireplaces
cooking black market or self-gathered food. Had Seki cared
to, he could have uncovered any amount of evidence of
smuggling from the outside but during the first month of
internment he did nothing.
My American partner Eric and I lived with British in-
ternees in a building next to the creek. As in previous camps,
men lay shoulder to shoulder on long platforms. Vermin
life was worse and hospital facilities more primitive than
any previous place. Although Eric and I no longer were
members of the hospital staff, having been fired, I resumed
one chore by request of the Camp Committee: compiling
the daily sick roster. The job was welcome because it fur-
nished an opportunity to steal Japanese newspapers.
Seki’s medical orderly. Sergeant Tani, was a harried little
man buried under a mountain of paper work. One of his
tasks was to keep a daily report on each internee, as to
whether he was well enough to work or sick, and if sick,
how sick. He had two voluminous books for the purpose.
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The pages of each book were divided into five spaces, one
space for each sick man. Those spaces in turn were sub-
divided into tiny squares, one square for each day of the
month. Every day one square had to be filled with a Japa-
nese character denoting the man’s condition, whether he
had gotten well, was a little sick, very sick, in hospital, or
dying. My job was to fill each of those little squares, using
as a guide daily master sheets prepared in camp. The job
was impossibly long until Tani procured some rubber stamps
and I did not have to write the characters. After that it
could be done in an hour or two.
Seki received Japanese newspapers and mimeographed
army bulletins at irregular intervals. After he read them
they were passed around his office to the interpreter and
clerks and then came to the adjoining office occupied by
Tani, a clerk and the quartermaster. After each had read
the newspapers they were placed in a bound file beside
Seki’s desk. Tani occasionally left one lying on his desk.
That was my opportunity.
My nineteen master sheets, containing the name of each
internee and his state of health, were slightly larger in
dimension than the tabloid sized Japanese newspaper. Tani’s
desk was big enough for four persons to work at, two on each
side facing each other. I sat on the side opposite Tani and
directly across from his clerk. Beside me sat the quarter-
master. Seki’s interpreter was a suspicious soldier who fre-
quently stepped into Tani’s office and looked over my
shoulder. If for any reason Tani, his clerk and the quarter-
master were out of the office simultaneously, the interpreter
sent another soldier in to sit beside me. I was never alone
except when the interpreter happened to be away; then
everyone in the office relaxed and Tani would bring me a
cup of coffee from the kitchen. I always scattered my sheets
around my quarter of the table, where Tani laid the news-
paper when he finished with it. If he forgot about the news-
paper and did not look for it under the sheets all was well.
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At the end of my morning’s work I would gather the sheets,
shuffling the newspaper into them, and leave.
The first time I did it I was as nervous as a burglar on
his first job. However, I was never caught and apparently
they never connected me with their missing newspapers.
One harrowing morning, just as I had gathered up my sheets
with a newspaper in them, the interpreter came to the desk
looking for it. While I stood there holding the master
sheets and two books of medical reports, Tani, the inter-
preter and two clerks ransacked the desk and then the entire
office. Why not even the suspicious interpreter connected
me with the loss was strange but apparently they decided
one of the gate guards had taken it for they sent a clerk to
the guardhouse and I left. Father Van Gisbergen translated
the newspaper as he did others which followed.
The tone of Japanese press reports in 1945 was an inter-
esting contrast to that of 1942, 43 and ’44. During the first
two years newspapers sang paeans of victory even when the
stories themselves betrayed continuous defeats. The Japa-
nese fleet kept sinking the American fleet closer and closer
to Japan. Japanese soldiers kept annihilating American sol-
diers on various Pacific islands, also closer and closer to
Japan. But, said Japanese propaganda, these battles were
being fought in an ever narrowing radius to the homeland,
merely for the purpose of luring foolish Americans into
traps so they could be wiped out more easily.
However, in 1945 Japanese propaganda took another
turn, changing to wails of despair. Already we had seen, in
Muntok, posters exhorting Indonesians to assist Nippon in
repelling expected invaders. Then had come the surprising
story declaring, “The battle of Leyte will decide the fate
of Nippon’s holy war in the Pacific.”
A newspaper I stole in May, 1945, said “America is cruelly
and bloodily attacking Nippon whose only motive in this
holy war is to make Asia a land of peace and co-prosperity.”
But surprise of surprises was a picture magazine I found
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on Tani’s desk when I sat down to work one morning. The
magazine lay open at a double spread in color of a mighty
fleet steaming to victory. Plowing the waves straight off the
page into the reader’s eye was a head-on view of a battleship
flanked by cruisers and destroyers and followed by aircraft
carriers. Overhead the sky was black with warplanes. Wing
markings of the planes were symbols of the American air
force and the battleship was flying the Stars and Stripes!
The fleet Japan had been sinking with such monotonous
regularity now was steaming in full battle array straight for
Tokyo Bay and a Japanese magazine was telling its readers
all about it.
I made no pretense of not seeing the magazine, as I
usually did the newspapers. I studied the picture, wishing
fervently I could read the caption. Then I thumbed through
the magazine. A full page was devoted to a drawing and
story of an American four-motored airplane, the biggest
thing I had ever seen. It was labeled B-29.
“I’ve got to get this article,” I said to myself. “I’ve got to.”
I closed the magazine, pushed it aside and looked up
into the eyes of Tani’s clerk. His face was expressionless. I
glanced at Tani. He, too, was watching me. He turned his
eyes away, back to his work. We busied ourselves with our
respective tasks. Presently the clerk left the room. Tani rose
from his desk, walked around the table and stood beside
me. He asked a question about the number of sick. I showed
him the figures. He picked up the magazine, turned the
pages to the battle fleet picture and laid the magazine down,
open. Then he said in Malay two words.
“Big ship.”
“Yes,” I replied, also in Malay, “big ship.”
“American,” he said.
“Yes, American.”
“America big country. Yes?”
“Yes, America big country.”
He hissed, with a long intake of breath, and said.
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“America very strong, yes?"
“Yes, very strong."
He walked back around the desk, stood for a moment
looking out the window, and said,
“Nippon very brave, but so small."
Tani turned from the window and poked among some
bottles on a shelf behind him. Selecting a jar marked
“Vit.B" he turned to the table, poured powder from the jar
into a small piece of paper. Carefully ^ folded the paper
around the powder and handed it to me.
“Eat," he said. “Good for you."
His clerk returned to the office bearing a tray on which
were three glasses. He placed one in front of me. Tani
handed me a Japanese cigaret and a match. I lit the cigaret.
The glass contained hot coffee with an inch of sugar on the
bottom. The interpreter and Seki were away.
Tani and his clerk had always been cordial but today
they were more so. Plainly they had wanted me to see the
magazine. And just as plainly I could not steal it because
they would spot its absence the moment it was gone. But I
could do one thing if given half a chance. Tear out the
story of the B-29. The chance came when the clerk returned
the glasses and Tani also left the room. In the other office
was another clerk but my back was toward him. I took a
knife from my pocket and cut the page so there would be
no tearing noise.
Father Van Gisbergen translated the article. It described
in detail the new American super-plane that was “cruelly
and wantonly raining fire on Japanese women and children,
thereby violating all the rules of humanity and Christianity
which Americans so loudly profess."
It described the plane’s fire power, bomb capacity, cruis-
ing range and invincibility.
Japanese propaganda was preparing the people for defeat.
America was too big, too strong and too cruel to be con-
quered.
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Compiling the sick roster had another advantage than
stealing newspapers. Back in 1939 as I was leaving my home
in Salt Lake City to start my journey to the Orient, I sud-
denly remembered I had lost my fountain pen. Lying on
my father’s desk was a dollar pen he had purchased and dis-
carded. I picked it up, carried it to Japan, China, India, the
Indies, and when I was fished out of the sea into a lifeboat
it was still safely clipped in my shirt pocket. I still had it in
Belalau and used it occasionally as bait in Tani’s office.
Haihos wanted fountain pens and I supposed the Japanese
did too and would pay more, if no one was looking.
Seki’s clerk, on a morning he was the only Japanese in
the office, made an offer. I rejected it. After several weeks
of furtive haggling he paid what I wanted: two beer bottles
filled with coconut oil, a bottle of palm oil and thirty
guilders— for my dollar fountain pen. Oil was the most
precious foodstuff obtainable, next to meat.
My oil driller friend, Nick Koot, who had made the con-
tainers in which I buried Camp News, was a partner in a
neat trick on the Japanese. Koot’s camp job was to keep in
repair the ramshackle truck that brought our daily rations.
The garage was adjacent to Seki’s office. Food supplies for
Seki’s staff were kept in a locked storeroom next to the
garage. Among the supplies was a 200 liter (52.8 gallons)
drum of palm oil.
Koot determined to tap the oil drum. He requested and
obtained an assistant named Roel de Jong for the truck re-
pairing job. Koot and De Jong spent two weeks preparing
for the palm oil burglary. Vital to the project was a duplicate
key to the storeroom. Dangling from his belt on the end of
a chain Sesuki, the Japanese quartermaster, carried the
only key. De Jong engaged Sesuki in conversation while
Koot surreptitiously fingered the key and made an impres-
sion on a small piece of soap. Using the impression as a
model they made a duplicate key. Next, while one stood
watch, the other oiled the lock and tried the key to make
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sure both worked silently. Third step was fashioning a
wrench to fit the drum lid. Finally, they dug two holes, the
size of water buckets, in the private garden outside their
block. There the oil would be buried until any possibility
of a camp search had passed.
Choosing a torrential night rain storm to cover sight and
sound of their movements they crawled on their bellies
through the fence gate, directly in front of the guard room,
reached the storeroom, unlocked the door, slipped through,
closed it behind them and went to work.
From an adjoining room came voices of two guards, shout-
ing to make themselves heard by each other above the violent
drumming of the rain. The palm oil drum was tipped on its
side, the lid unscrewed and the two water buckets filled.
Working only by their sense of touch in the pitch darkness
of the storeroom, Koot and De Jong accomplished the en-
tire job without clanging metal against metal. Also, they
wiped the floor with rags to obliterate mud and any spilled
oil. Still protected by the rain storm they returned to camp
and buried their oil.
Doctors Kampschuur and Kramer distinguished them-
selves in Belalau; Kampschuur by his hunting prowess and
Kramer by a daring and successful operation.
Kampschuur talked Seki into allowing him to hunt wild
pigs, with gun and flashlight, one night a week accompanied
by a guard. Pigs come out of the jungle at night to feed on
rubber tree nuts and ubi kayu. The Japanese benefited by a
cut of the meat and we benefited by pork sauce on our rice
whenever Kampschuur was successful. Seki furnished the
gun and ammunition.
Kramer performed a successful major abdominal opera-
tion on a 62-year-old Dutchman named J. A. M. van der
Vossen, whom Kramer diagnosed as having an intestinal
obstruction. The chances of surviving such an operation in
our primitive circumstances were overwhelmingly negative.
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On the other hand, death was certain if the obstruction was
not removed. Van der Vossen chose to gamble.
I did not witness the operation but Kramer said he used
a table knife and spoon. His scalpel was made from the
table knife. The spoon’s use I don’t know. He made clips
from fence wire to hold the intestines. Everything was
boiled for two hours. Morphine was the only anesthetic.
The operation was performed in the open air, on a bamboo
table. Van der Vossen was walking around within two
weeks.
The hospital in Belalau was a bamboo shed with a palm
roof, dirt floor and space on its benches for only forty
patients; hence only critical cases could be admitted. Black-
water fever, which derives its name from excessive bleeding
through the kidneys, increased. Once chronic malaria
changed into blackwater fever, death usually followed
quickly, the crisis coming within forty-eight hours of the
fever’s onset. Doctors said a victim had only a ten per cent
chance of survival without blood transfusions. Internees
were not physically able to donate blood.
Librarian Harold Lawson was one of two men who sur-
vived blackwater fever. However, the sickness left him with
a revulsion for food. He would not eat. Several friends, my-
self included, took turns feeding him. It was no mere
mechanical process of spooning rice into his mouth, but of
making him swallow it by pleading, cajolery or threats.
“Open your mouth, Harold, and take this spoonful.”
He was so weak his voice was scarcely audible.
“I can’t.”
“You’ve got to. If you don’t eat you won’t recover.”
“I can’t.”
“Please, Harold, just one swallow.”
“Only one?”
“That’s all.”
He opened his mouth. The spoon went in. He held the
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rice in his mouth a time, trying to chew. His jaws moved
feebly, then he swallowed. I filled the spoon again, brought
it to his mouth.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You said only one.”
“I know, but it wasn't a whole spoon. I put only a little
in it so you could swallow easier.”
I can t.
“Say, are you throwing in the sponge? Show some guts
and eat this.”
He opened his mouth. Swallowed. Closed his eyes.
I waited while he rested from the effort, then filled an-
other spoon.
“Harold. Wake up.”
His eyes opened.
“Open your mouth.”
“No.”
“Listen. I've got other things to do besides sitting here
and playing nursemaid. If you can’t reciprocate a courtesy,
the hell with you.”
He opened his mouth. Swallowed and fell asleep. Poor
guy. He couldn’t help it but unless he was forced to eat he
would die like those who had no friends to bully them into
eating. I joggled his shoulder.
“Wake up, Harold.”
He awakened.
“Open your mouth.”
“I can't.”
“Eat this, damn you, or I’ll shove it down your throat.”
He opened his mouth and swallowed.
After a week of that kind of feeding Lawson’s body was
strong enough to awaken his will. Once the will took hold
the battle was nearly won. Lawson’s feeding was by no
means unique. Other men were saved similarly.
Black-bearded W. Probyn Allen, who had helped me
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edit Camp News and each Christmas had read the English
words of the gospel story sung by Father Bakker’s choir, was
stricken with blackwater fever and carried into hospital
March 22nd. He had weighed around 240 pounds when
we first met in Palembang Jail. Now he weighed less than
half of that.
In 1942 we had gone partnerships in buying an old Dutch
atlas. While I was visiting him in hospital the day after he
was stricken he suddenly remembered the atlas. He told me
where it was concealed next to his bunk.
“We located a lot of places in that old atlas,” he said,
“didn't we?”
“We sure did.”
“Best investment we made in camp.”
I agreed it was and asked if he wanted anything done.
“Nothing, thanks, except bring me some news when vou
get it.”
He was in pain but he did not betray it by word or action.
He knew exactly how deadly was blackwater and that he had
it but if any fears were in his mind he did not show them.
I asked Hollweg, his doctor, about giving Allen a blood
transfusion.
“Where will we get the blood?” he asked.
“How about mine?”
“You haven't enough for yourself,” said Hollweg, “nor
has anyone else.”
Saturday morning I told Allen I would have some news
for him the following day because a Japanese newspaper
was being translated.
“That's fine, Mac, I'll be expecting you tomorrow.”
When “tomorrow” came it was Palm Sunday, March
25th. I was walking into the hospital when an attendant
told me Allen had just died. That was my first real shock
of internment. I thought he was going to pull through. He
was only 34.
I sat down on the edge of the hospital bench, at the
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place where Allen had lain and which now was vacant.
Through memory tumbled the words of the poem he had
written to his wife and published in Camp News at Christ-
mas, 1942, more than three years before in Palembang Jail.
The opening lines were:
It needs no festal time to bring you to my mind.
For every sunrise, every close of day, I find
Your image by me, smiling, bidding me good cheer.
Whispering our private nonsenses I love to hear. . . .
Often he had talked of their country cottage in England
and of the reunion they would have there when the war
ended. Well, God had willed otherwise. The sixteen-line
poem, I thought, would be an imperishable thing of Allen
for his wife to treasure and in which to find comfort. It
ended:
Have faith, my love, although the night is dark, the day
Will break, and peace and good will come to men at last.
God bless you and keep you always.
I walked back to my bunk and wrote a letter to his wife
enclosing the poem. It was delivered after the war.
The working party was enlarging our cemetery space in
the rubber trees two hundred meters from camp and did
not finish in time to dig more graves Sunday. By Monday
another man had died, necessitating a double funeral.
Friends of the two men lined up beside the coffins and
Hammet read Church of England services. Then, flanked
by guards, we struck out through the rubber trees.
“It doesn’t seem possible that he has gone,” said Oosten.
“He had so much life. I can still hear his voice. How it
rang when he laughed.”
I could still hear it too, as the coffins were lowered into
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a double grave in the clearing. The trees were very high all
around us but enough had been felled in this one spot so
that a patch of sky was visible above us and sunlight
streamed through to illuminate the reddish mounds of
earth in the vast dimness of the rubber forest.
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Let’s Go Smuggling
A new kind of hunger ravished our vitals in Bela-
lau. In contrast to the sick gnawing of Muntok
Jail the hunger was a healthy, ravenous, never
satished appetite.
In Muntok our stomach capacities had shrunk until they
could not hold a full meal even when such a phenomenon
occurred as it had on the birthday of Queen Wilhelmina,
August 31, 1944. The kitchen, by careful husbanding and
special appeals to the Chinese contractor, had amassed
enough supplies to give every internee a full meal. Most of
us were unable to eat it at one sitting.
In Belalau our new lease on life expanded both our
appetites and our stomachs. But we could never get enough
to satisfy them. Ironically, although Belalau was in a land
of plenty, our rations increased only slightly. The region
abounded in rice, maize, vegetables, fruit, tobacco and
coffee. Its streams were full of fish, its jungles teemed
with game. However, we could get none of its bounty
through the Japanese. There was no alternative but to get
it ourselves. Three methods were possible; trading through
guards, smuggling, or ubi raiding.
All three enterprises were included under the general
designation of black marketing; however, in prison camp
that word did not have the connotation it has in ordinary
society. For the most part black marketing was a highly
honorable— and vitally necessary— profession. It saved more
lives than doctors or medicine.
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Inflation and acute goods shortages were disrupting the
Japanese occupation economy. Chinese merchants in Loe-
boek Linggau were turning paper money into goods. They
would pay fantastic paper prices for cloth, watches, jewelry
or silver money. Javanese and Malay farmers, unable for
three years to obtain cloth, were in rags and anxious to trade
farm produce for our clothing.
Our Haiho guards, eager for money whether silver or
paper, were ready-made middle men between us and the
merchants or natives. The squeeze they exacted, however,
was so high that a handful of daring men began slipping
through the fence at night, with or without connivance of
bribed Haihos, and traveling to native huts about three
hours distant, to do their own bartering. These men were
the smugglers.
Ubi raiders were those who sneaked out at night to a
nearby cultivated area known as a ladang and dug up ubi
kayu.
There was a flurry of trading, smuggling and ubi raiding
within two weeks of our arrival at Belalau. Then Seki
cracked down on the Haihos who, in turn, laid for the
smugglers. Four were caught the first night. One of them,
a big Indo-European named Bolle, was tied to a tree for
sixteen hours and beaten at intervals by the same Haihos
who had been trading with us. Then all four smugglers were
turned over to the Kempeitai, who took them to jail in
Loeboek Linggau where Bolle died. His three companions,
hollow eyed and weak, returned to camp after fifty days.
The Kempeitai assigned Malay field police to watch the
native kampongs. Seki increased the guard and instructed
them to shoot on sight. Seki's real coup d’etat on smuggling
was not the increased guards or shooting orders but a barri-
cade of felled trees around the camp. Crossing it without
making a noise was ticklish and difficult.
Our food situation once more became acute and some
men reverted to catching rats.
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Despite Seki's efforts, certain Haihos still traded with
internees and a few prisoners found ways of getting out.
Smuggling gangs were organized by men experienced in
jungle work and willing to run any risk for food. Leaders of
the most successful smuggling rings were a Dutchman
named Anton Breet, the Ambonese Louhenapessie, the
Indo-European policeman Max Breuer, and a husky native
of the Celebes islands, named Mandang. I decided to be-
come a smuggler myself. Mandang took me under his wing.
* * * *
Let's go on my first smuggling trip;
Mandang’s inside men have spotted the position of each
guard. The sergeant in charge of the night shift has just
left the guardhouse, walked across the plank bridge over
the creek and now is inspecting guard posts along the fence.
Mandang has chosen to leave camp by wading up the creek,
slipping under the fence, which spans it, then under the
guards’ bridge, and climbing the opposite bank. In that way
we avoid the tree barricade. We run the risk of a Haiho or
Japanese leaving the guardhouse unexpectedly and spotting
us in the water below the bridge but the odds are in our
favor. Mandang knows by heart the guard routine.
Four of us have been sitting by the creek waiting for the
sergeant to cross the bridge. The four are Mandang, an
Ambonese named Sitanala, the Indo-European Tempelers,
who scaled the Muntok Jail wall, and myself. I am a tender-
foot, the others jungle veterans. The sergeant clumps across
the bridge and walks along the fence. Now is the time.
Mandang steps into the creek and wades up it, keeping
close to the bank. He ducks under the barbed wire. Sitanala
follows, then me, and lastly, Tempelers. We are to keep
this order throughout the trip.
The time is shortly after 7 p.m. The moon has not yet
risen and thunderclouds are beginning to blanket the
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heavens; however, the quality of darkness still permits us
vision of shapes and obstacles.
We move slowly, feeling with our bare toes for firm foot-
ing. To fall or splash would arouse Haihos in the guard-
house. Tm under the fence now and, straightening, see
Sitanala going under the bridge. He waits for me in its
darker shadow. When I arrive he crosses the creek in the
shadow of the bridge. I follow. He snakes up the bank and
disappears into bushes. I belly after him, wishing I could
move with his silent suppleness. We rise to hands and
knees, moving very slowly and parting the bushes with our
hands until we are in the rubber trees, then we stand erect.
No words are spoken. Sitanala directs me with his hands
to hold onto the knapsack on his back. Behind me I feel
Tempelers holding onto mine. Night is Stygian in the rub-
ber forest. I am blind. So is our leader Mandang but he
does not need to see. His toes are his eyes. They explore
the ground, tell him where to step. He inches forward; we
follow in lock step, placing our feet where his have been,
striving to move without breaking twigs or dead branches.
Every sound we make is magnified by our straining ears and
sends little waves of alarm along tingling nerves. Over and
over I repeat to myself,
'‘Quiet. Quiet. TTie Japs will hear."
Because of the location of Japanese occupied buildings,
the undergrowth choked terrain of the rubber estate and
surrounding jungle, and certain geographical bottlenecks
caused by swamps, deep streams and steep hillsides, there
are only three possible routes to our destination. The one
we are using tonight is the shortest because for approxi-
mately two kilometers it utilizes the road to the Women’s
Camp instead of jungle or rubber tree trail. A path extends
from the guard's footbridge to the road on this side of the
creek but it is too likely to be patrolled this time of night
so we cross it, go farther into the rubber, then travel parallel
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to the path until we reach the road. Although the distance
is short it takes an hour of painfully slow progress to cover
it because we are still within earshot of Japanese quarters.
We reach the road. Sitanala’s hands tell me to wait. He
and Mandang explore along the road in opposite directions,
stopping every few feet to listen. They return. All clear. We
sit down and put on our rubber shoes. Mine are a pair I
bought just before being captured and have preserved by
wearing only on special occasions, like funerals or tonight.
The road is stony. Mandang whispers,
'‘Are you ready, Mac?"
“Yes."
“We start. Walk fast. We lost much time."
They walk so fast I find it difficult to keep up. We no
longer cling to each other. I follow by ear, listening to the
scuffling pad, pad of their feet. Occasionally one of us acci-
dentally kicks a stone. It cracks sharply against other stones.
Mandang halts, commands more caution and resumes his
breakneck pace.
We leave the road and follow a steep, slippery trail. I go
up, using my hands to keep from sliding back. At the top
we again intersect the road. The trail is a shortcut.
Lightning abruptly rips the night. Thunder claps and,
while I'm reswallowing my heart, rain hits us as though
thrown from a bucket. Ten minutes later it stops. Mandang
has slowed to a crawl. He is feeling along the road edge. He
halts, whispers my name, cups his mouth to my ear and says,
“A sentry post is just ahead. We are near the Women’s
Camp. Now we leave the road and go around the camp."
Now comes another hazardous leg of the journey. We
must circle the Women’s Camp by clambering up a tree
covered hillside to a long unused trail above the camp.
Mandang leads us off the road and we start climbing, again
clinging to each other’s knapsacks. We reach the old trail.
My legs feel knee high grass or weeds. We halt. Sitanala
puts his lips to my ear.
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“Straight below is the Women’s Camp, close enough
for guards to hear. We must climb over a fallen tree. I will
guide your feet. Take care.”
Below us, as in a black void, I see pinpoints of light
marking the Women’s Camp.
Sitanala maneuvers his way across the tree. My exploring
hands, following Sitanala’s passage, feel a waist high tree
trunk. Lower down, my feet touch branches and above is
another branch, as if the tree forks near me. I wriggle be-
tween the two. Sitanala’s hands guide one of my feet and
place it on a branch which gives me a step up and over an-
other tree trunk. Then I am across.
I inch forward a few paces to make room for Tempelers
behind me. My face bangs against another tree. Constella-
tions of pain blaze in my eyes. My nose feels smashed flat.
Mandang, hearing the thud, seizes my arm and pulls me
down to my knees. We duck under a tree that lies across the
trail at head height.
Slowly the night becomes lighter. Objects distinguish
themselves as darker masses in the darkness. Mandang
orders a halt. We listen. While we stand, straining our ears,
the moon comes out. In the trees we can not see it but the
gloom lessens. We start forward, negotiate another fallen
tree, pick up speed for a time but gradually slow to a crawl.
Somewhere close, Mandang knows, is a wooden footbridge
over a little stream. Planks are missing from the approach
on this side so that we must take a long, almost leaping,
stride, from earth to bridge. His sense of timing tells him
the bridge should be near but his toes cannot find the
jumping off place. We keep going forward, first one foot
feeling, then the other . . .
Suddenly Mandang starts stamping and muttering curses.
Sitanala jumps as though shot and slaps at his legs. I lose
my balance, fall forward and the next second my hands and
arms are stung with electric fire. Ants. Myriads of vicious,
biting, stinging, flesh piercing ants. We have walked into
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a bed of them. Mandang's bare feet — he removed his shoes
when we left the road— felt them first; Sitanala, not until
they swarmed over his shoe tops, while I reached them first
with my hands. Tempelers, amply warned, jumps back to
safety. Retreating likewise I beat, slap and rub the ants
from my hands and arms. Mandang reverses our course.
There had been no ant bed on the trail when he last traveled
it. We have taken a wrong fork. Backtracking, he finds the
correct fork and continues along it to the foot bridge. We
each take a long, blind stride, to clear the missing plank,
then step cautiously, feeling for loose planks or holes.
The trail swings sharply left, dips downhill. I hear running
water and see a patch of moonlight ahead. We emerge from
the gloom of the trees onto a bridge which has not been
used for a long time. Missing planks leave treacherous holes.
Mandang speaks aloud for the first time since leaving camp.
“Sit down. Let us smoke.”
Tempelers laughs loudly.
“Now we can talk. We are past danger.”
“We are far from the Women's Camp,” says Mandang.
“No one can hear us here.”
In the moonlight we examine each other for leeches
which infest the trail, lying in wait on foliage for passing
prey. Dark smears on our legs, arms or necks disclose where
the repulsive, carnivorous worms have embedded themselves
to suck our blood. Removing them with thumb and fore-
finger is not easy. Pulled from the skin they stick to fingers.
We flip them off, crushing them on the wood of the bridge.
Uneasily I keep looking around. Sensing my thoughts,
Mandang says,
“No Japanese come this far at night. They are afraid of
tigers and wild pigs.”
“Are there tigers here?”
“I am not sure but the Japanese and Haihos think so.
There are many pigs. Perhaps we will see some. I would
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rather meet a tiger than a mother pig with young. The tiger
will run away but the pig might charge.”
We roll nipa leaf cigarets and smoke. The moon rides
just above the tree tops, bathing the bridge with light and
silvering the stream on either side. We are relaxed and feel
an exuberant thrill of freedom. Around us are no fences
or walls or guards. Our companions are trees, a running
stream, forest noises and insects which glow suddenly in the
gloom and sometimes startle me because they look so much
like distant flashlights.
My skin crawls momentarily as I look across the stream
into two gleaming eyes, or what I think are eyes. They dis-
appear. I relax again.
Our cigarets smoked, we leave the bridge and step once
more into darkness. The trail dips into a gully. Trees and
bushes close over our heads and we are once more blind,
holding onto each other’s sacks, moving slowly.
“We are coming to a narrow bridge,” says Mandang.
I can hear his feet tapping the ground, feeling, then a
hollow thump. I move closer to Sitanala so that our bodies
are practically one as I try to follow the movement of his
feet. Tempelers similarly is glued to me. I feel wood, hear
a hollow sound. Then Mandang falls heavily, plunging
through a rotten board. Such falls can break a leg. His
breath hisses in pain as he drags his leg out of the hole. We
wait while he recovers, then continue on.
I slip and land flat on my back. Tempelers, like a cat,
jumps over me but loses his balance and thuds to the
ground.
Mandang halts, takes a torch of resinous wood from his
knapsack and lights it with three matches struck simulta-
neously. The matches I have saved since buying them in
1942. The torch flares, lighting a trail slimy underfoot, criss-
crossed with fallen limbs and overhung with giant ferns.
“Here it is safe for lights,” says Mandang. He walks, fan-
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ning the torch by waving it vigorously so it will stay alight.
We can see enough to walk rapidly.
We emerge from the gully onto a flat, hard, giassless
surface. Instead of vines or weeds the undergrowth on
either side of what appears once to have been a road is
sparse bushes, like individual saplings without branches.
Mandang extinguishes the torch.
‘'Now we must be careful, Mac. Here is danger. Ahead is
the main road. If anything happens stand still. Don't
move.”
We creep along, moving slightly uphill. Far ahead my
straining eyes discern a greyness through the trees. The
edge of the rubber.
Crash! My heart flipflops. Moving figures smash through
the brush at us. We're caught! Smart Japanese have been
lying at the rubber edge waiting. Run! But Mandang's
orders were to stand still. I freeze. Why don't they flash
lights on us? Other sounds become audible in the uproar of
trampling brush. Grunts. More grunts. Sitanala speaks.
“Pigs. Not Japs. Wild pigs.”
The relief is comic. We can hear each other's breathing.
Wordlessly we sit down while pounding pulses quiet. After
a while Mandang rises and we creep toward the grey light.
Soon we are at the edge of the rubber, but ahead are bushes,
thick and higher than our heads. Mandang tells us to wait.
He wriggles through the bushes silently as a Red Indian of
fiction. After a long time a faint whistle sounds.
Tempelers now leads. We follow him through the bushes
but not with Mandang's stealth. I struggle with embracing
tendrils. Sometimes it seems I'm hopelessly tangled. Finally
we are through into clear moonlight. Directly in front of us
is the road. Almost invisible at our feet is a deep, narrow,
grass-concealed ditch. A long step takes me across. Mandang
hisses,
“Back! Into the ditch!”
Tempelers and Sitanala throw themselves into the weeds.
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roll into the ditch. I likewise. And Mandang. As I roll into
the ditch I find myself on the shoulders of Sitanala. That
saves me from a rough tumble because the ditch is shoulder
high.
“Listen/’ says Mandang.
A rumbling sounds. Unmistakably a motor vehicle. Man-
dang’s keen ears detected the noise before any of us. An-
other moment and headlights flood the road. We crouch
too low to see anything. Sounds like a truck. It passes with
a rumble and rattle. We raise our heads only to duck again.
Another truck. And another. Mandang tears handfuls of
long grass, holds it above his head and peers over the ditch
top. A truck convoy.
We wait a considerable time before crawling from the
ditch. Mandang leads. Instead of scuttling across the road,
however, he walks leisurely along it. We follow in single
file. He turns, points to a board spanning a deep ditch on
the other side of the road, balances himself across the
board while we follow one by one and walk along a foot-
path to a steeply roofed building. It is the first house in
the Javanese settlement known as Petanahan. We walk
around it and continue deeper into the cultivated area.
Scattered, one-story houses stand out sharply on the moon-
bathed land. We slide down one side of a deep ravine,
scramble up the other and find ourselves in a patch of ubi
kayu, the stalks higher than our heads.
“Wait,” says Mandang.
He and Tempelers disappear.
Presently a whistle sounds beyond the ubi kayu. We
follow it, emerge beside a house. Mandang and Tempelers
are talking to a small Javanese man in white shorts and
dark jacket. Beside him is an even smaller woman, clad in
a sarong. The little man leads us away from the house into
a field of maize. We pick our way between the rows until
we come to a small clearing in the middle of the field where
grow a few papaya trees. This is our trading rendezvous. It
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is safer than the house because police sometimes pay sur-
prise night calls at Petanahan.
The farmer leaves us there, squatting on the soft earth
so our heads are below the maize tops, and soon reappears
with a second man. They are carrying straw mats which
they spread on the ground. Mandang introduces me. The
first man is named Barto and the second is his son, Radi.
Mandang tells them I am an American.
“Selamat, Tuan American,” they greet me.
“Selamat,” I reply.
We all sit, cross-legged, on the mats. Linguist Mandang
converses with them in their native Javanese. Radi lays a
small, flat tin on the mat in front of me. Tobacco and nipa
leaves. I roll a long, fat cigaret and light it with a match to
astound Radi and Barto. It does. Matches they have not
seen since the war began.
Radi asks me, in Malay, how far it is to America.
My guess is 15,000 kilometers.*
His mind can not grasp such a distance. I translate it into
days of travel by steamboat. Thirty days. He murmurs in-
credulously.
Sitanala whispers to me occasional translated tidbits from
Barto’s words to Mandang. Barto says the head man of
Petanahan, a man named Mangoen, was informed by the
Japanese, when they came to confiscate more rice, that the
war would end this year for certain. The price of rice in
Loeboek Linggau now is 400 guilders a kaling. A kaling is
the standard of bulk measurement among colonists. It is
the amount contained in a kerosene tin, between 15 and 16
kilograms (33 to 35.2 pounds).** Tobacco prices also are
sky high— five guilders a lempeng, an amount about the
size of a shredded wheat biscuit, and weighing about forty
grams. Petanahan is full of fever and there is no quinine.
Have we any quinine? Radi’s friend Ali has a wife with a
* 1 kilometer = .62 of a mile. 1 mile =1.6 kilometer.
** 1 kilogram = 2.2 pounds.
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sore leg. Have we medicine? I promise to bring medicine
next time.
Barto’s wife appears bearing food. Hot rice, small fried
fish and ubi chips and two vegetables I do not recognize.
Radi says it is the first fish they have had in moons.
Rice is ladled from the central dish onto banana leaves
and passed to us. I take an ubi chip with my left hand and
convey it to my mouth. Radi speaks sharply.
I have committed a crude faux pas. Eating with the left
hand is unclean. Only the right hand can convey food to
the mouth. Mandang, Tempelers and Sitanala make voluble
excuses for my barbarity, explain that Americans are ig-
norant of table manners. I am pardoned.
By mistake I take too much hot pepper sauce. My mouth
catches fire, my eyes and nose run and I sneeze and hiccup.
Tempelers laughs uproariously. Barto and Radi grin. Mrs.
Barto comes with hot coffee. Barto pours it into china cups.
We light cigarets and the business of trading begins.
“Show him your goods," Mandang tells me.
From my homemade knapsack of rice sacking I draw
precious clothing Eric and I have acquired and saved. Two
pairs of good shorts, a shirt and one of the ties I found in
Palembang Jail. I brought the tie on a hunch. Radi seizes it
for his own, not permitting it to be placed with the shorts
and shirt for which Barto will bargain.
Mandang, Barto and Radi haggle politely in Javanese.
While they talk the round moon drifts across the sky from
one side of the papaya trees to the other. At last Mandang
tells me,
“Barto will give you a kaling of red rice for your things.
Radi will give two kilograms for the tie. He wants the tie
as a waist sash for his sarong. Do you agree?"
I agree. It is a good bargain.
Trading resumes as Mandang and Tempelers dispose of
their own goods. Barto's wife leaves to find Radi’s friend
Ali. Ali comes and the three men carry kalings of rice and
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maize from their hiding places to us. My knapsack holds
just one kaling of rice.
When trading is finished, the goods exchanged and paid
for, I remind Radi he still owes me two kilograms for the
tie. Radi says he will pay me next trip. We have traded
them out of all their rice. In fact he would like to borrow
back a kilogram of rice for his meal next day. Mandang says
Radi evidently is telling the truth and for the sake of future
good will I should lend him the kilogram. With a coconut
shell we measure the amount, give it back to Radi. Now he
owes me three kilograms. I have an initating hunch he’ll
never pay.
We help each other to shoulder our loads. Mine is the
lightest, 15 kilograms (33 pounds). I volunteer to carry
more because Mandang is bent under 35 kilograms (77
pounds) but he advises me to walk for an hour and then
decide whether my load shall be increased. Sitanala and
Tempelers have around 25 kilograms each. We have not
walked a kilometer before I am thankful my 15 kilograms
is not more. I begin to realize how much strength I have
lost.
Down the ravine we slide and crawl up the other side on
hands and knees. Successfully I negotiate the first roadside
ditch but disaster overtakes me on the second. I take the
necessary long stride but it is not long enough. The load
shortens my step and down I tumble. My chest strikes the
opposite side and the 15 kilograms on my back combines
with the blow to punch every breath of air from my lungs.
Stunned and gasping I lie wedged in the bottom of the
ditch. My companions drop their loads to extricate me,
shove me into the bushes and crawl in themselves. Now we
are safely oflE the road.
Every place that had given us difficulty enroute to Feta-
nahan is tougher returning, loaded. I dread falling, not only
because of the noise, but because of the effort to rise again
with a dead weight on my back.
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We ignite the torch and its smoky flare helps us up the
long, tunnel-like gully. At the top we extinguish the torch.
Moonlight helps us across the crucial fallen trees above the
Women’s Camp. We strike the road. This is the last lap.
We hurry to make up for lost time. Sweat soaks me and
stings my eyes.
The moon is too high for us to chance slipping into camp
via the creek behind the guardhouse. Behind the hospital
is a break in the tree barrier through which coffins are car-
ried to the cemetery. A sentry box is there but the sentry
has a habit of leaving it shortly before he is to be relieved.
Instead of waiting for his relief to arrive at the box he walks
along the fence to meet him, thus gaining a few minutes
on quitting time. The guards will change at 5 a.m. Man-
dang’s watch says 4:15.
To reach the banier break we must pass directly behind
Seki’s house where he and his officers are sleeping. Once at
the barrier we must lie and listen for the sentry to stir in
his box and walk away toward the main gate. After that we
will have about three minutes to slip through the opening,
reach the fence, get through it with our loads and out of
sight.
We leave the road and start through the trees around
Seki’s house. We make or break from here in. Either we get
through, or get caught and face the music. To my nervous
ears our footsteps sound like men with iron feet walking on
broken glass. Seki must be drugged to sleep through such
noise. And if he’s drugged the Haiho sentry must be dead.
Any second now there should be a yell and a shot and run-
ning footsteps.
We are crouching outside the barrier, waiting, waiting,
waiting. After an interminable time we hear a scuffle of feet
in the sentry box. The guard clears his throat and spits,
rattles his rifle, hums a few bars of a Malay tune, steps
from the box and begins his illicit stroll to the front gate,
seventy-five feet away.
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This is the payoff. Mandang rises. We rise. Mandang
heads for the fence. We follow. Fm so nervous my stomach
is turning somersaults, my heart is doing the high hurdles
and the hair of my neck is sending off sparks. How can the
guard not hear us?
We're at the fence. Moonlight floods it like a giant
searchlight. How can the guard not see us? This is how a
convict must feel when he's going over the wall. Only we're
going in not out. Mandang shucks his knapsack like a lizard
shedding its skin, seizes a strand of barbed wire and raises
it, depresses another strand with his foot. Sitanala is through.
I'm through. Mandang and Tempelers hoist their loads over
the top, drop them into our arms. We set them on the
ground, spread the barbed wire strands for Mandang and
Tempelers. They're through. We pick up our loads and run
across the moonlit expanse for the hospital doorway, duck
into its shadow and stop, panting. Seconds later a scuffling
in the box announces the five o'clock sentry has arrived.
A curious attendant looks us over. He chuckles,
‘Ten per cent commission for using hospital hiding
facilities."
We separate and go to our respective blocks.
Eric had been up for an hour keeping a can of tea warm
on a tiny fire.
“I was beginning to worry," he said. “It's awfully close
to roll call."
I drank the tea. It was warm and stimulating.
“Better get out of those clothes," Eric said. “You look
a mess."
I was daubed with mud. Stripping, I waded into the
creek to wash and pull off leeches. Even after removing them
blood continued to well, for a while, in a little trickle mark-
ing where each leech had clung.
When I returned Eric had the rice emptied into small
sacks and stowed away in our rat-proof tin trunk, another
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treasure from Palembang Jail. We smoked Radi’s tobacco
and talked. I was still keyed up by the nervous tension of
the trip and its success. After roll call I lay down and tried
to sleep. Too much noise. I got up.
‘‘Let’s have some rice,” I suggested to Eric.
“Right.”
We borrowed a kuali, a heavy iron cooking vessel reminis-
cent of a gold pan, and measured into it 400 grams of rice.
We gloated over the beauty of the red, hill rice. Unlike the
white, polished rice of camp rations the red rice was only
partially husked and had a nutty flavor. We decided to cook
400 grams a day. Fifteen kilograms would last 37 days. That
would do much toward rebuilding our strength. Meanwhile,
we would acquire goods for another smuggling trip.
As our rice stocks dwindled we cast around camp for goods
to barter on a percentage basis. That required estimating
the value of any article to within a kilogram. Smuggling
was pure gamble. My first trip had been a success but the
next might not be. Clothing owners were reluctant to share
risks with a smuggler— splitting the profits if his trip suc-
ceeded and losing if he was caught or otherwise failed. They
preferred to sell outright for a standard price— three to five
kilograms on the spot for a pair of shorts— and let the smug-
gler take all the risks— both on his investment and on his
neck. I decided to get a customer who would trust me and
be willing to lose if I lost.
“Get cloth, thread and silver guilders,” I told Bishop
Mekkelholt, “and we’ll do business on a fifty-fifty basis. If
the trip is successful we split. If not, we both lose.”
“Agreed,” said the Bishop.
He put a Brother to work cutting up white cassocks and
sewing them into shorts of a correct size for small statured
Javanese. Another Brother laboriously unraveled socks and
sweaters for thread and yarn to sell to Javanese women.
Handing me a wide red satin sash, such as bishops wear
with their cassocks, he commented.
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“One of the Javanese wives might like this."
On my second trip I accompanied another smuggling
king, former policeman Max Breuer and his three men.
There was no moon. We shipped through the fence behind
the kitchen, where wood cutters had made a passage through
the tree barrier. On striking the road we sat down in the
darkness and donned our shoes.
At Petanahan we went to the house of Ali, for whose wife
I had brought medicine and a bandage for her ulcerated
leg.
A wick burning in a dish of palm oil was the only illu-
mination in Ali’s hut. We palavered in Malay. Ali and his
wife wanted goods but they had no rice or maize to trade.
They said the Japanese had taken everything. Ali's house
was of bamboo slats chinked with mud. It had a thatched
roof and dirt floor. We sat on wooden stools around the
table in the light of the palm oil lamp.
Bishop Mekkelholt had asked me to get a few eggs for
one of his sick priests.
“Even if they are very expensive, get them," Bishop
Mekkelholt had said, “because he is dying."
Mrs. Ali said she would sell two eggs for one silver guilder
—fifty cents an egg. Fantastic as was the price I bought two,
reflecting that Mrs. Ali was not very grateful for the medi-
cine I had brought her.
We moved to the house of Karman. He was prosperous
and had been expecting Breuer. Karman’s house was two
stories high. A ladder led to the upper floor where we ate
and bargained in whispers. Mrs. Karman and several other
women appeared. I reached in the knapsack for the crimson
sash of Bishop Mekkelholt. That would widen their eyes!
The sash wasn't there. I turned the sack inside out. Still no
sash. The horrid truth chilled me. It had fallen out when
I took my shoes from the sack when we reached the road
outside camp.
Breuer traded Karman out of all his rice and maize, about
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fifty kilos. There was none left for me and my goods, except
a bottle of palm oil Mrs. Karman gave me for a ball of
thread.
I packed the bottle and the two eggs into twelve kilo-
grams of rice I agreed to pack back for Brener. Before en-
tering camp we searched in vain for the sash. For me the
trip was a failure. I had lost the sash, worth many kilo-
grams, and gotten only two eggs and a small bottle of palm
oil.
Next morning a native bullock herder found the sash,
brought it to Seki's office. Seki knew it had come from our
camp but could prove nothing. However, the find disclosed
our exit and it was bottled up. Smuggling became more
difficult.
My third trip was with Mandang again.
“We must fix a Haiho,” Mandang decreed, “it is too
dangerous otherwise.”
My share of the “fix” was one towel and a bar of soap,
costing me five kilograms of rice to purchase in camp.
Haihos worked around the clock in twelve hour shifts,
alternating hours off and on sentry post duty. For example
the Haiho going on fence guard duty at 6 p.m. would be
relieved at 7 p.m., spend the next hour in the guardhouse
and go back to the sentry post at 8 o’clock. And so on
through the night until 6 a.m. The Haiho we bribed agreed
not to be at a certain spot on the fence at 6:30 p.m. and
again at 4: 30 a.m. Roll calls were at 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
At 6:30 P.M., just after roll call and before dark, we wrig-
gled through the fence, gingerly picked our way across the
barrier of fallen trees and ducked into the rubber. We took
a different route. Although longer, it avoided places we
feared might be watched not only by Seki’s men but by
other Haihos who would demand a cut and “capture” us
if we refused. We struggled through a knee deep morass,
gained a trail and head^ for the main road.
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A heavy rainstorm drenched us. We plodded on, slipping,
falling, miserable. We reached the main road after dark, at
a point about four kilometers from Petanahan. Mandang
depended on his keen ears to warn us of approaching traffic
in time to jump off the road. None came. The rain stung
our flesh like hail. We spied some banana trees, cut off
leaves and held them over our heads as shields. At Petana-
han we went directly to the house of Mangoen, the head
man.
Mangoen’s house was more a hall with back room and
upper story for living quarters. The hall was a gathering
place for his people. Seventy Javanese farmers and their
families were scattered over the colony of Petanahan. Man-
goen refined palm oil and cured tobacco, in addition to
farming.
My trading goods totaled three pairs of shorts, one under-
shirt, one white polo shirt, one ball of black wool yarn
(made from a sweater), two rolls of white thread (made
from the Bishop’s socks ) , two silver guilders and two pieces
of white muslin cloth each eighteen feet long and one foot
wide. Mrs. Mangoen took the thread and cloth and three
of Mangoen’s friends took the shorts. For my goods I re-
ceived seventeen kilograms of maize, two kilograms of rice,
two beer bottles of palm oil and two live chickens. If kam-
pong chickens are carried by their feet, head down, they
do not squawk.
The return trip was easier because my legs and back were
stronger. My nerves never got any stronger though. I was
always scared going through the fence. Mandang never be-
trayed fear of anything. He had nerves of steel.
We had started the return trip too late. Although we
walked at top speed, without a single stop for rest, dawn
was lighting the world when we reached the barrier. It was
after 5 a.m., too late for our fixed Haiho. Another guard
would be on duty. We would have to risk getting in on our
own.
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Mandang shed his load and told us to wait while he ex-
plored. He crept along the barricade, peeking through and
listening. Dawn rapidly became full daylight. We heard the
bell clang for 5:30 a.m. tea. That was when we filled our
drinking bottles for the day. More time passed. No Man-
dang. A single clang of the bell warned that roll call was
about to ring.
Holy Mackerel! We would have to ditch our loads— and
my chickens— and make a break for it.
Mandang suddenly materialized. He seized his sack, threw
it over his shoulder and started along the barrier at a dog
trot. At a certain place he turned and started across. We
followed, over tree trunks and big limbs. Strangely, there
were no small dead branches to break and pop and crackle
underfoot. We crossed, ran for the fence. On the other side
were three of Mandang’s friends. They held the wire strands
apart and grabbed our loads. Then we went through.
The roll call bell clanged. I ran to my block, jumped up
onto my mat and pulled a blanket over my muddy clothing.
The block leader changed his roster to include me as a sick
man. For roll call, well men lined up outside the block and
sick men lay in their beds. Japanese guards counted inside
and outside simultaneously so there could be no switching
for cover up purposes. I was safe.
Eric came in after roll call. He said,
“Don’t give me heart failure like that again.”
“My heart’s still out there on the fence,” I said.
Eric roasted some ubi he had brought back from a raid
while I was at Petanahan. I did the trading with natives
because I knew some Malay, while Eric, who was huskier
and could carry bigger loads, sneaked out to a nearby cul-
tivated area and dug ubi, which was harder to carry.
Seven kilograms of maize were required to pay my share
of our debts and the new fix required to get in that morn-
ing. Mandang’s inside pals had been watching the fence.
When they spotted him on the other side of the barrier
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they went to work. The guard was bribed to stand where
he was and talk to them while two others found the best
place for us to come through. Mandang then had done a
quick but thorough job of removing small dead branches to
lessen the noise of our passage at the selected place.
Later that morning I delivered Bishop Mekkelholt his
share, including one of the chickens. The other chicken
Eric and I planned to fatten and eat on the Fourth of July.
“You'd better say a few prayers of thanksgiving that we
got in," I told the Bishop. “We nearly didn’t make it."
He laughed.
“I already have," he said. “In fact I offered Mass this
morning for the success of your black market expedition.”
That established a custom. Whenever we went out smug-
gling or ubi raiding Bishop Mekkelholt offered a Mass for
our safe return.
We named our chicken Oscar and assiduously went about
the business of fattening him for a feast July 4th and
guarding him from the hazards of camp life. We fed him
raw and cooked maize and rice, acquired in our smuggling
deals, and grubs we unearthed ourselves around camp. Noth-
ing was too good or too much trouble for Oscar. We guarded
him zealously by day and at night staked him under our
sleeping bench. We determined to make the Fourth of
July, 1945, in Belalau as memorable an event as had been
the Fourth of July, 1942, in Palembang Jail. Every year,
and this was our fourth Independence Day in captivity,
Eric and I had managed to stage some kind of celebra-
tion.
The first one, July 4, 1942, in Palembang Jail had been a
red letter day to which our Dutch and British friends con-
tributed. Beissel had cooked the dinner for ten. Around the
table had been the two honored American guests, Eric and
I; my two shipwreck mates Oosten and Colijn, my Camp
News partner Allen, Doc West, Van der Vliet who was
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then Camp Leader, Dr. Hollweg who amazed us by produc-
ing a fifth of gin, Camp Poet Curran-Sharp and Beissel
himself.
Standing solemnly with upraised tin cups containing In-
dependence Day gin rickeys we had drunk a toast proposed
by Allen:
‘Gentlemen, I give you the President of the United
States of America, Queen Wilhelmina and King George of
England.”
Three years later, on July 4, 1945, in Belalau, Eric and I
raised two tin cups filled with coffee, waved them over
Oscar, who lay beautifully fried in an iron skillet, and
toasted our good luck in being alive. We said:
“Here's how.”
And drank.
Allen, Colijn and Curran-Sharp were dead. West was
gone, taken away by the Japanese. We hoped he was still
alive. Van der Vliet and Beissel were mere private citizens
of the camp, having long since been succeeded as Leader
and Chief Cook respectively. With Hollweg we rarely
spoke. Beissel and Oosten remembered the day and brought
us a present of tobacco.
I wished that Herbert Smallwood of the handlebar
moustache was still around to trumpet the Star Spangled
Banner as he did on July 4, 1943. I wondered why Christ-
mas and Independence Day meant so much more to me in
captivity.
Oscar was our first and last chicken dinner of internment.
During ensuing months smuggling became more difficult
and dangerous. Frequently we returned empty handed. Let’s
go on the trip that finished Petanahan:
Again Mandang, Sitanala, Tempelers and I have taken
the shortest but most dangerous route, the same one we
took on my first trip. As on previous journeys we hurry
along the road, circle the Women’s Camp, negotiate the
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fallen trees and rest for awhile on the bridge to smoke and
pull leeches from our hides. Tonight there is no moon, the
sky is overcast and, except for the road, progress has been
painfully slow.
Tempelers suggests we light the torches. Mandang de-
murs, explaining,
“I don’t feel good.”
That’s his way of saying he has a hunch there is danger
ahead. We respect his hunches.
“Mac,” says Mandang, “change places with Sitanala and
hang onto me. No falling in the gully. We must go slow
and quiet. And no lights.”
Never have I gone down the steep gully without slipping
and falling at least once. Mandang removes his shoes. We
do likewise.
“Okay,” says Mandang, starting.
“Okay,” we echo and begin moving.
I try to follow Mandang’s feet with my feet. He takes
short, solid steps. At every step his foot seems to become
rooted to the ground. Only once has he ever fallen when I
was along and that was when a bridge plank broke beneath
his weight. My eyes ache from trying to see where sight
is impossible. I close them. The quality of darkness is not
changed whether my eyes are open or closed. It is like the
time my lamp went out in a lead-silver mine where I worked
summers while going to college. I had to feel my way for
1 200 feet back to a pumping station where I had left my can
of fresh carbide fuel for the lamp. The gully’s darkness is
like that, only more treacherous.
Tempelers, bringing up the rear, slips, thuds down strik-
ing Sitanala, who is knocked down and bangs into me.
Down I go, striking Mandang, but he stands like a rock.
Struggling to my feet I slip and fall into a water filled hole
beside the trail. Tempelers is swearing in a shrill whisper
and saying his ankle must be broken.
“Take it easy,” Mandang says. “Be quiet. We will wait.”
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We untangle ourselves, continue. My right hip feels as
though a sledge hammer had struck it.
After a century or two we are out of the gully and onto
the flat, near the main road. We halt, listen and listen and
listen. Then listen some more. If ears could stretch, mine
would be sweeping the air in all directions like the antennae
of a sightless bug.
This is where the wild pigs frightened us before. The
trail we are on is broad and slippery and ends at the road a
few hundred feet away. Across the road is Petanahan. We
inch forward, feeling with our bare toes before putting down
our weight, avoiding twigs and branches. Mandang moves
off the trail into the bushes— we following— and halts. At
that instant it happens.
The trail is a blaze of light. We freeze at the edge of the
trees. The lights do not move to sweep the terrain but re-
main stationary, pointing along the trail. The sudden growl
of an engine starter and roar of a motor indicate that the
lights are headlights of a truck parked on the trail where it
intersects the road. It is backing onto the road. As it turns
the headlights sweep us but our motionless figures probably
blend with the trees, for nothing happens. The truck moves
only a short distance along the road and halts. Voices
sound, sharp staccato Japanese voices. Flashlights dart
hither and thither, occasionally flashing in our direction but
it is apparent they are not looking for us and do not suspect
our presence.
Mandang’s hunch had been correct. Had we come down
that gully waving a torch, or been even seconds slower leav-
ing the trail, we would have been pinioned in those head-
lights.
What’s going on? A raid on Petanahan?
Another pair of headlights flash on. Another motor
sounds. More voices, a rattle as of bayonets being sheathed
or unsheathed. The vehicles grind into gear and move,
gather speed, disappear.
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We remain motionless until my legs go numb from the
cramp of holding them rigid. Finally Mandang sits down.
We too. Time drags. At last Mandang and Tempelers creep
to the road. Another long time, then a whistle. Sitanala and
I go. Mandang and Tempelers are in the ditch. They climb
out. We leap the ditch, hurry across the road and the other
ditch, strike across the fields to the ravine near Barto’s. We
wait while Mandang calls on Barto. He returns to say Mrs.
Barto told him to go away, the Japanese have been there.
Did they take her husband? She does not know. He was
not home when they called.
We visit house after house, find only women. The Japa-
nese raided Petanahan, searched houses. Wherever they
found European clothing the men were arrested. A Javanese
farmer had sold some of our clothing in Loeboek Linggau.
It had been traced.
The women are anxious to get rid of us. Mandang asks
Ali's wife to find Mangoen and bring him to us. She says
she will if I doctor her sore leg. Okay. We go into her
house. The palm oil lamp is flickering. The sore on her leg
is nearly healed. I rebandage it and tell her to leave it alone
for a week. Meanwhile, a girl arrives, limping badly. Around
her foot is a filthy rag. I remove it. An ulcer. I tell Ali's wife
to heat water and soak the girl's foot. While it is soaking
Ali's wife goes for Mangoen and we go out and hide in a
nearby ubi patch.
Mangoen comes after a long time. He says fifteen men
were arrested. He is afraid the Japanese will return. Please,
won't we go? He has no more rice or maize and will not
trade clothing for palm oil or chickens. I tell him I have
thread for his wife and silver guilders for him. I want oil
and chickens.
Mangoen owes Mandang thirty kilograms of maize and
rice and me five kilograms from a previous deal. Mandang
insists on receiving something. We know we can not return.
Mangoen finally agrees to pay each of us half of what he
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owes. He also will buy my thread and silver guilders. We
pay him for permission to dig ubi from his patch so we will
have full loads. He leaves to get the maize, oil and chickens.
While we are digging a man comes running.
“Nippon! Nippon!"
We seize the sacks, drag them far back into the ubi patch
and lie down. My heart thumps mightily. Perhaps an hour
passes. Nippon does not come. Mangoen appears, says it
was a false alarm. He has two bottles of oil and a chicken.
Another farmer carries a kaling of maize for Mandang. That
is all we can get.
Mangoen leads us over an unfamiliar route winding
through Petanahan's rolling fields, hills and ravines. We
balance across logs spanning ditches. On one I sit down,
ignominiously, and worm across on my backside. The sack
of ubi is like a bag of rocks.
Finally we emerge on the road. Mangoen says that di-
rectly across the road begins a trail that will take us even-
tually to a point behind the guardhouse. Mandang leading,
we strike the trail. He snails along, frequently testing the
ground with his hands. Later he explains that the rubber
plantation has different kinds of earth and he can tell ap-
proximately where he is by feeling the earth. We come out
behind the guardhouse.
I have been carrying the chicken by its feet, head down,
and it has been silent for three hours, all the way. But at
this moment, directly behind the guardhouse, the chicken
flaps its wings and squawks. I fall on it to smother its noise.
“Knife," hisses Mandang.
I have a knife in my hip pocket. Quick as a flash Mandang
reaches beneath me, seizes the chicken’s neck, throttles it
with one hand and grasps it around the body with the other.
I whip out the knife, open it, slice the chicken’s throat.
When not a quiver is left in the bird I roll off it.
We lie for a long time in the bushes beside the creek,
behind the guardhouse, listening for the Haihos to walk
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across the bridge at guard change time. Finally they do. As
soon as their footsteps die away, and before the men coming
off duty approach, we slip into the creek, duck under the
bridge, under the fence and come up inside camp.
After roll call I take the dead chicken to my friends.
Quartermaster Thomson and Hospital Bookkeeper Hilling.
I had promised them one a long time ago. They wanted to
fatten it as Eric and I did ours for the Fourth of July.
Now they will have to eat it immediately, skinny as it is.
“Sorry fellows,” I say, “but the damn thing just wouldn't
cooperate.”
Fm too tired to explain further. I go to my bunk and
stretch out. My nerves and muscles twitch and jump. Fm
afraid that’s the last trip to Petanahan.
The following night two smugglers named Smit and
Stegeman left for Petanahan. Mandang warned them not
to risk it but they ignored him. They did not return.
Two or three friendly Haihos told us not to smuggle any
more. They said the rubber estate was being patrolled by
Malay field police known as Jchos, under direction of
Kempeitai officers. It was the job of the Jehos not only to
watch for internees but also to keep the Haihos from reach-
ing the native kampongs when off duty and thus bartering
goods for grain to resell in our camp. Thus the Haihos also
became prisoners in a sense. The Japanese learned they
could no longer trust them even to guard us.
Cut off from smuggling we concentrated on ubi raiding.
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C AMP BELALAU was near one edge of the rub-
ber estate, on the side opposite the hill tract and
settlement known as Petanahan. Not far from
the camp was another ladang, or cultivated tract, several
square miles in area, that had been abandoned except for
a small part used by the Japanese. The ladang was bounded
on one side by the rubber estate and on three sides by
jungle. It was a wild area in which one easily could become
lost at night. Patches of ubi kayu, scattered over its hill-
sides, were targets for our ubi raiders.
Men caught visiting the ladang were not punished as
severely as were smugglers who dealt with natives. The
Japanese regarded dealing with natives as dangerous to their
occupation. Instead of being beaten and turned over to the
Kempeitai as were smugglers, the ubi raiders were beaten
and imprisoned for thirty days on half rations in a dark
room in Seki’s quarters.
There was a constant, brisk demand for ubi kayu. It was
cheaper— only three to six guilders a kilogram compared
with thirty to seventy guilders a kilogram for maize, rice,
and beans. Also it had more bulk than the grains. Because
of the demand and the lesser risks involved, more men en-
gaged in ubi raiding although comparatively few did it regu-
larly for a living. Eric and I became members of a small
circle of men who smuggled ubi regularly on a cash basis.
Eventually we were nicknamed the Ubi Kings. We had
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narrow escapes but were never caught. Many others were
less fortunate.
Routes to the ladang, like routes to Petanahan, were
limited by geographical as well as by Japanese factors. The
shortest route was handicapped by an initial hazard of two
fences, the outer fence being about fifty feet beyond the
inner one.
A gate used by Japanese to reach their garden in the
ladang was in the outer fence. A sentry box was at the gate.
When a bribable Haiho was on duty at the gate it was a
matter of timing our exits and entrances to a brief period
he agreed not to be at the gate. For that purpose a time-
piece was necessary. Since I had no watch of my own I
usually borrowed a small alarm clock from Hospital Book-
keeper Hilling or rented, for a kilogram of ubi, a watch from
Direct Action Drysdale, who resigned as British leader five
months after his hard won election. If the wrong Haiho
was at the gate, or the guards were unexpectedly changed,
we had to spend an hour or more circling the camp and
coming in elsewhere at our own risk. Haihos, also, some-
times betrayed us.
Let’s go ubi raiding:
Successfully Eric and I have left camp and now are en-
tering the ladang — a rolling wilderness of tall grass and
weeds, scattered trees, swampy ground and bushes which re-
semble scrub oak and are just as impenetrable. The horizon
is a distant black arc where sky meets trees, either rubber
or jungle.
A well defined trail continues into the ladang from where
we leave the rubber but the trail is deceptive because at a
point several hundred meters into the ladang it branches
like a river on reaching a swampy delta by the sea. The in-
experienced ubi raider is apt to take a false trail that dis-
appears in undergrowth. A huge tree towering above its
fellows near the ladang edge is the only landmark near the
trail. Even that vanishes as we go deeper into the area. A
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ground mist diffuses the moon’s rays, casting an eerie half-
light over everything. The Japanese do not know of the ubi
patch on this end of the ladang. They guard the other end.
We watch the ground carefully so as not to lose the twist-
ing trail. It guides us to our second landmark, a clump of
barren banana trees in the middle of an open space. Up a
hill from the trees are the ubi. We reach the ubi and go to
work. This patch contains the biggest roots I have ever
seen. Some are as large as a man’s leg.
The technique of ubi picking is to seize a plant at the
base of its thick, brittle stem and, by exerting a steady pull
so as not to break off the stalk with a loud pop, uproot it.
Two men are required to uproot large ubi, the stems of
which are sometimes fifteen to twenty feet high with
crooked, leafy branches. Pulling is easier when rain has
softened the earth. Once the plant is loosened we feel along
the roots, following their underground meanderings, dig-
ging with our hands so as not to miss a single tuber.
Crackling noises nearby startle us. We halt. Grunts tell
us that other ubi fanciers— wild pigs— also are rooting for
dinner. We resume our labors. Each expedition requires a
longer time to fill our sacks because the patch is being
culled to extinction. Tonight we work our way up to the
crest of a little hill and down the other side. Finally our
sacks are filled. My carrying capacity now is between twenty
and twenty-five kilograms. Eric can pack up to thirty-five.
On a previous trip I learned the foolishness of trying to
carry a bigger load than I could lift onto my own back with-
out assistance. The lesson was a hard one:
On that occasion I had taken burly Peter de Groot, Nick
Koot’s partner in the Bottom Bath business, on his first ubi
raid. We had wandered far in our picking and were late
starting back. My load was so heavy I couldn’t lift it by
myself. Peter had to help me. I staggered forward, back
bent, chin buried on my chest. We had walked a much
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longer time than necessary to reach the trail before I realized
I had missed it. I began circling to regain my bearings.
Peter followed unquestioningly. Finally I had to tell him
we were lost. I dropped my load and told him to stay where
he was and act as a beacon for me by whistling every two
or three minutes while I cast about in ever widening circles
to find the trail. It took me nearly an hour and the night
was running out.
After we had followed the trail until it became well
enough defined so Peter could not lose it, I told him,
“Go ahead of me. You can walk faster with your load
and make it in time. I'll keep plugging along and, if neces-
sary, I’ll ditch my load and come back for it tonight."
Peter went around me. He was probably fifty feet ahead
when a light flashed on him. Caught! I moved off the trail,
sank to the ground and rolled over so my sack would not
drop with a thud. I was sure they had not yet seen me.
But Peter had not been caught. The light was Mandang
returning from a smuggling trip. He had found a new place
to trade. The route lay partly through the ladang. He also
had found a flashlight that operated, not on batteries, but
on a tiny dynamo powered by alternately squeezing and
releasing a pistol-like handle. TTie light blinked on and off
as the handle was squeezed and released.
Together we resumed our hike to camp. My load grew
heavier at every step. I would stumble and find it impossible
to rise. Mandang or Peter would have to help me up. My
knees were giving out under the overload. Finally, near the
gate, I dropped the sack and began removing part of its
contents.
“What’s the matter?" asked Mandang.
“I’ll never get this through the fence if I don’t unload
part of it."
“Don’t do that," he said, and seizing the sack, swung it
onto his own powerful shoulders on top of the knapsack he
already was carrying.
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“Go on/' he said, “we’re late/*
After that I never carried a load I couldn’t lift by myself.
Tonight, when our sacks are filled, Eric and I shoulder
them and start for camp. However, instead of climbing back
up the hill and going down the other side to the trail, we
circle the hill to save time. The moon is still up but a mist
has settled at knee height so that the ground is invisible,
and our legs disappear from the knees down. It is like wad-
ing through water without pressure or wetness. Presently
we are on mushy ground, then swampy, then a morass. An-
other painful lesson. There is no shortcut over unfamiliar
ground. We work back to the hill, climb it, sight our banana
trees and strike out for the trail.
When we reach the rubber trees we readjust our loads,
preparatory to tackling the last stretch to the gate. We find
the gate ajar and the sentry box empty. The Haiho has been
well bribed. We close the gate, hurry to the inner fence,
slip through, wade the creek and are safely home.
One of Mandang’s men is waiting for us.
“You’re in luck again,” he says. “Did you hear the shots?”
“No.”
“The Japs caught a bunch coming in from the ladang
and beat hell out of them. They are in the guardhouse
now.”
Eric built a fire while I peeled and washed half a dozen
small ubi. Private cooking fires during the night did not
excite Japanese curiosity. I think they did not want to know
what we were doing.
The Japanese could have kept us in camp by various
methods, such as a ring of Japanese guards— because Malay
Haihos were too susceptible to bribery— or by building a
solid wall around us, or by summarily executing any pris-
oner caught outside the fence. They had neither the man-
power for so many Japanese guards, nor materials for a wall.
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Executions would have stopped us but Seki apparently did
not wish to indulge in firing squads.
The crime of ubi raiding obviously was not so much in
the raiding as in getting caught. It was a kind of grim game
we played with the Japanese. The losers paid in beatings
and acute starvation for thirty days. The winners ate ubi
kayu undisturbed.
Eric and I roasted the ubi, split them lengthwise, re-
moved the tough center fiber and spread palm oil exactly
as if we were buttering a roast potato. Ubi kayu hot and
roasted was delicious.
When morning came word got around that the American
Ubi Kings had made another successful trip. Customers ar-
rived, buying in lots from 250 grams upwards. Our sale
price that day was four guilders a kilogram (1000 grams).
We sold two-thirds of our load and kept the other third
for our own use. When we ran out we would go on another
raid.
We brought a kilogram to the Bishop, along with our
standing joke.
‘'Here is a Mass stipend. We made another safe trip.”
Eric played a leading role in one of the wildest and most
disastrous nights for ubi raiders. We had planned a trip
together that night but, when I heard sixteen other internees
also were planning to go out and wanted experienced men
to lead them, I declined. Crowds were too risky.
Eric agreed to lead a party of four. When the trip began
he discovered eight were waiting. He decided to take a
chance anyway and got them all through the first fence. Just
as he reached the second fence lights flashed. Ambushed!
Japanese converged from both sides. Fences were behind
and in front. However, the gate already had been partially
opened by the bribed Haiho. Eric hurled himself at the
opening and was through as rifles cracked and bullets whis-
tled over his head. He leaped off the trail into a tangle of
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bushes and lay still. Two guards pounded past, ranning up
the trail toward the ladang where they thought he had
gone.
The other ubi raiders were trapped inside the fences,
caught and taken to the guardhouse. In the confusion the
gate was left open. Eric had to get back inside camp before
a roll call was held to discover his identity. The open gate
was the quickest way. If the bribed Haiho was still in the
sentry box he might allow Eric to pass. Eric snaked up to
the sentry box on his belly, maneuvered silently so as to get
a look at the guard's profile against the sky and thus ascer-
tain if he was the right Haiho. Such an angle view meant
that Eric’s head was only a few feet from the side of the
sentry box. Eric lined up the Haiho’s profile with the sky
and at that instant the Haiho raised his rifle and fired, not
at Eric but through the roof of the box.
Eric leaped up and ran back into the rubber. Japanese
and more Haihos came running. A game of blindman’s buff
ensued with Eric and his pursuers trying to locate each other
by sound. Flashlights stabbed the night but he kept out of
their range. The interruption had delayed roll call. While
Japanese and Haihos beat the bushes and trees at the lower
end of camp Eric clawed his way through undergrowth to
the upper end, scrambled across the barricade and got
through the fence. He was so winded and exhausted when
he reached our block he could not speak.
Meanwhile, day shift guards had been called out to
supplement the night shift crew. Japanese and Haihos held
sack at the fence all night, nabbing other ubi raiders who
had left before Eric’s gang and were returning unaware of
what had happened.
Although Eric got in safely and in time for roll call his
identity was revealed by some of his companions who be-
trayed him in order to escape a beating. Next morning Eric
and three other internees were summoned to Seki’s office.
The other three had not been out but had intended to go
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and were stopped by the commotion. Eric’s betrayers knew
of their intentions and told the Japanese they also had been
out but, like Eric, must have managed to get back in un-
detected.
Evidently Seki despised traitors even while he used them.
He lectured Eric and the other three on how fortunate they
were not to have been shot during the chase, warned them
they would be shot next time and told them to go back to
camp. The informers he sentenced to the customary thirty
days on half rations in the total darkness of the detention
room.
Later he told Camp Leader Van Asbeck:
“If you let only experts go to the ladang they will not
get caught. Amateurs are bunglers.”
What about internees who could neither trade nor
smuggle nor raid and who were too poor to buy even ubi?
If they did not have friends to help them and lived solely
on the Japanese rations they died, even among the compara-
tive plenty of Belalau. Many men were doomed by beri-beri
or chronic malaria or dysentery before they reached Belalau.
Extra food could not save them. Others seemed unable to
help themselves in any way, either because they feared the
risks or simply were constitutionally helpless. Even during
the most prosperous smuggling periods there was never
enough coming in to supply the demands of all.
Like other smugglers Eric and I had sick friends we
helped gratis but our supplies were never enough to go far
and our own bellies frequently were empty.
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By Eastern Windows
**And not by eastern windows only
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowlyl
But westward look, the land is bright!”
Arthur Hugh Clough, 1819-1861
P RIME MINISTER WINSTON CHURCHILL
quoted that stanza, from the poem “Say Not the
Struggle Naught Availeth,” during a memorable
speech to Parliament in gloomy 1941. Churchill's fighting
words and the golden hope expressed in the poem echoed
around the world to Bangka Island and lodged in the heart
of an obscure missionary priest, Father Benedictus Bakker.
They helped give Father Bakker courage when the Japa-
nese overran his parish, disrupted his work of a lifetime, de-
stroyed his beloved music and threw him into prison. They
so inspired him during dark days of imprisonment that, in
gratitude, he set the poem to music, dedicated the composi-
tion to Chtirchill and taught it to the choir in Palembang
Jail.
I wondered how Father Bakker could compose in the
babel of the jail. Perhaps it was because the songs in his
heart drowned out the noises of men.
He was such a small man that friends made him a podium
on which to stand while directing his singers. One of his
happiest moments was the night he used it during a jail
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concert and conducted the choir in singing for the first
time the poem he had set to music:
Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain^
The enemy faints not, nor faileth.
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd.
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers.
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.
Seem here no painful inch to gain.
Far back, through creeks and inlets making.
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only.
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward look, the land is bright!
Besides his God, his church, his mission, his music and
Mr. Churchill, Father Bakker had another love: Queen
Wilhelmina. So for her he also composed and dedicated a
song. The choir sang it first on her birthday, August 31,
1942 -
Father Bakker had intended to send his compositions to
Churchill and Wilhelmina after the war. He asked me one
day, while we were exchanging language lessons, if I would
send the manuscripts to the Prime Minister and the Queen
should anything happen to him. I promised.
“Whenever I am worried,” said Father Bakker, “I think
of how Mr. Churchill and our Queen are beset by world
shaking problems; then my own troubles seem small.”
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Just as Churchill and Wilhelmina inspired Father Bakker,
so that little priest’s zeal, devotion and music inspired us,
his fellow prisoners. The choir was more than pleasant
entertainment. Amid the dirt, suffering and concentrated
meannesses of men in prison, the choir was a symbol both
of man’s better nature and of achievement. It not only
cheered us at concerts but lent a needed warmth and
solemnity to funerals, the last gestures we could make for
departed friends.
Death and disease reduced the choir’s ranks until it
ceased to function. Christmas, 1944, was its last appearance.
The beginning of the end for Father Bakker himself had
been when his twenty-nine fellow Bangka missionaries en-
tered Muntok Prison from Pangkal Pinang and he worked
himself to exhaustion trying to save them. Death took seven-
teen of them, including Monsignor Bouma who died in
Belalau April 19, 1945.
As Father Bakker’s own strength began to fail he drove
himself to complete a project to which he had dedicated
his talents: a composition in a new style of music for a
complete Mass. He had a premonition his time was short
so he worked on the manuscript each day as long as there
was light to see. Finally, he collapsed and was taken into
hospital.
The soup Eric and I brought could only cheer his spirits,
it was too late to help his body. On an afternoon in June,
1945, I had something besides soup to cheer him. A new
internee had arrived in camp with authentic news of Ameri-
can victories in the Pacific. He was an Indo-European radio
technician who had been forced to work for the Japanese
keeping in repair military transmitters and receivers in
Palembang. He said American broadcasts had made much
of the capture of an island named I wo Jima, describing it
as the first real Japanese soil conquered by American forces.
Now Tokyo could be bombed at will.
I had lost my twenty-five guilder bet that the war would
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end by June 1st but I made another wager with Doc Lentze
that we would be free by September 1st. The loser was to
give the winner a chicken.
Dr. Lentze, Harrison and others, who had remained in
Muntok with fifteen patients too sick to be transported,
had rejoined us in Belalau after eleven patients died and
four improved sufficiently to travel.
Father Bakker smiled weakly when I told him of the
chicken bet. But his eyes lighted at the news of Iwo Jima.
He needed something more than Churchill’s words to cheer
him now. His life was draining away. “Intestines,” as the
Japanese would say. His black Vandyke beard failed to hide
drawn lips and sunken cheeks. The pinched look of death
was in his face. His arms lay limply beside him. He fingered
a rosary with one hand as we talked.
“It can’t be long now. Father,” I said. “'The radio says
Iwo Jima is only about seven hundred miles from Japan. In
a couple of months we’ll walk out of here together.”
“I am afraid not, Mac,” he said. “I am exhausted and
now I have the dysentery.”
He paused to gather breath for more words.
“I am trying but I have no strength.”
He rested awhile, then,
“Maybe you will see Iwo Jima after the war.”
“Perhaps I will.”
“If you do, say a prayer for me when you get there, and
say one also for the Japanese. Don’t hate them,”
He gathered his breath for more words.
“Don’t forget the manuscripts, will you, Mac?”
“I won’t forget. I promise you they will be delivered,” *
Father Bakker died June 14, 1945, at Belalau. His grave is
the sixty-eighth in the clearing among the rubber trees.
* Representatives of United Press delivered the manuscripts early in
1946. Mr. Churchill, through the British Consul in Miami, Florida, where
he was visiting at the time; and Queen Wilhelmina, through her secre-
tary, wrote me, acknowledging receipt of the songs. I hope that in their
busy lives they found time to have them played.
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“Say a prayer for the Japanese. Don’t hate them.”
Father Bakker had asked that in behalf of those responsi-
ble for his death. His heart had been too big for hate.
That was my second object lesson in charity in Belalau.
The first had been shortly after our arrival in March,
^ 945 -
Bishop Mekkelholt was in hospital with dysentery. He
sent word he would like to see me. He was lying on the end
of a row. I squatted down beside the bench. He did not
waste words.
Naming a man I despised and who was no friend of the
Bishop’s, he said,
“An emergency appeal has been made for quinine hydro-
chloride to give him.”
Pills containing the compound quinine hydrochloride
could be dissolved into liquid for hypodermic injection in
cases of severe malaria. One pill was sufficient for one injec-
tion. Other types of quinine could not be used for injection
but had to be taken by mouth.
I knew what was coming. I had a few pills of quinine
hydrochloride. Bishop Mekkelholt wanted me to give
them up.
Just before leaving Muntok, Harrison handed me the pills
saying,
“Doc West gave me these in case you got another bad
attack of malaria. Now that we’re being separated you had
better take them.”
Already I had given away some of the pills. They had
helped save a priest ward attendant who was dying of
malaria. That was how Bishop Mekkelholt had learned of
them. Now he was asking me to give away some more—
not for himself, nor for one of his priests, nor even for a
friend, but for a man who, to say the least, was no friend
of his and who was an enemy of mine. In my opinion the
man had done much harm in camp, from the time he first
joined us in Muntok Prison. He had not been with us in
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Palembang. I can not say more about him without reveal-
ing his identity.
“He isn’t worth saving,” I said, “and even if he were he
doesn’t really need them. I saw him this morning and he is
not critically ill. He only thinks he is.”
Bishop Mekkelholt thought differently, saying,
“Dr. Kampschuur says the man has both dysentery and
malaria and is allergic to quinine by mouth. One or two
injections now will stop the malaria and enable him to
fight off the dysentery.”
“No, Bishop. I have only ten pills left and I might need
them to save myself or a friend, or some one more valuable
to the camp than he.”
“Mac,” said the Bishop, “he may have done some mis-
chief but he also is capable of doing much good. It is not
for you or me to judge the value of a life.”
I hesitated.
“Please, Mac,” said the Bishop, and he smiled. “I’ll pray
that you don’t get malaria.”
I returned to my bunk, got five pills and gave them to the
Bishop, saying,
“Give them to the doctor for him but don’t say where
they came from.”
The remaining five pills were used to help save a young
Englishman who was critically ill with malaria.
Neither man was ever told the origin of the pills.
Things began occurring in August which encouraged
me to believe I might win my bet of a chicken with Dr.
Lentze.
On August i8th four-motored planes passed over camp,
but they were too high for identification. I believed the
Japanese did not have four-motored, land based planes and
that the planes therefore were British or American. If they
were Allied craft there should have been an air raid alarm.
Since no alarm, why?
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317
On August 20th Smit and Stegeman, the smugglers who
had disappeared, returned. They said they had been caught
by Japanese on the trail to Petanahan, imprisoned, but not
beaten.
August 21st several Haihos ran away. Their fellows sent
a spokesman into camp at night to ask a Dutch official
what fate awaited Haihos when the Japanese surrendered.
The official told him that depended on the individual
Haiho.
August 23rd a Japanese machine gun company replaced
the Haihos. That night two Japanese guards, who had been
trading with internees, returned goods they had taken for
resale in Loeboek Linggau and paid debts they owed the
prisoners.
Simultaneously Seki announced a phenomenal ration in-
crease, quadrupling the amount we had been receiving.
August 24th at 2 p.M. all men who could walk were
summoned to gather outside the barbed wire, near Seki's
office. That was the first time such a thing had happened.
We felt sure the war had ended.
Seki appeared, accompanied by the interpreter, whose
face was swollen from an infected tooth. Tani, the medical
sergeant, and a Japanese major also were there. Guards
remained at their usual posts and did not come near us.
A table had been placed under the rubber trees. Seki and
the interpreter mounted it. Seki spoke in Japanese, a few
sentences at a time, and the interpreter translated. It was a
long speech. I will only paraphrase its substance.
‘Tuans,'' the interpreter said, and we pricked up our
ears. Heretofore the interpreter always had been careful to
address us by using a Malay phrase which was considered
an insult because it was used only in addressing coolies.
Now he spoke to us politely as Tuans.
“By the will of the Emperor," Seki said through the in-
terpreter, “the war is ended. The Emperor has decided to
end the war because the Americans are fighting cruelly and
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using a new type of bomb. It is called atom bomb. The
Emperor does not wish to continue such a cruel and in-
human war. Therefore the war is ended. Once more we are
friends.”
Seki paused. There was no sound from his listeners. Curi-
ous to see how men would react to one of the greatest
announcements of their lives, I studied the faces around me.
Most of them were expressionless. Not a murmur rose from
the crowd. There were no displays of emotion.
Seki continued:
“American soldiers, and perhaps also British, will come
to occupy Sumatra. [He said something else about Ameri-
can troops but I missed it.] We Japanese soldiers will soon
go home. I have been in charge of you since April, 1944, and
I have done my best for you. I know it has not been enough
but I was powerless to do more.
“Men and women now may visit each other’s camps in
the daytime. Each internee must remain here until the new
occupation forces come. TAere will be no more roll calls.”
So this was my last roll call. I thought of my first in
Palembang Jail the morning of April 6, 1942. Standing in
line that morning had been well fleshed, shirtless men in
various stages of sunburn. Today, August 24, 1945, most
survivors of that first roll call were rail thin and uniformly
suntanned. Some were shambling skeletons who had
severely taxed their strength to stagger out here. Others,
like Eric and me, were gaunt but holding their own as a
result of smuggled food. A few were fat.
I thought of those missing from this last roll call who
were lying now in hospital or their cell blocks, too sick to
walk, or in the cemeteries of Palembang, Muntok and
Belalau.
Seki’s voice and the interpreter’s barking brought my
thoughts back to the business of learning we were free. Why
did they keep talking, repeating over and over the message
we had waited so long to hear? Seki went into considerable
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detail on what we should and should not do until the Allied
soldiers came. We were still in his custody and, until he
should be relieved of his post, he was responsible for our
well-being. Well-being! Hal
Finally he finished, repeating again:
‘Tet us be friends once more.”
He stepped down from the table, turned and walked
back to his office.
I asked a Dutch Indo-European beside me,
“Did you understand exactly what he said about the
American troops?”
The man looked as if he were about to burst into tears.
His eyes were misty and when he spoke his voice was
choked. He said:
“He didn’t say anything about our Queen!”
I was so astonished all I could reply was,
“Didn’t he?”
“No,” sobbed the Indo-European and now he really was
crying. “No. He didn’t say a word about our Queen.”
That was the kind of hold Wilhelmina had on the hearts
of her people.
As we walked back into camp a buzz of voices rose. Men
smiled and shook hands with each other. There were no
shouts. Eric and I sat down by our fireplace. Passers-by,
enroute to their own blocks, shook our hands. I felt no
exhilaration. We had been expecting the announcement.
Seki’s words seemed an anti-climax. For three years, four
months and nineteen days I had wondered what this mo-
ment would be like. Often I had discussed it. However, my
imagination had balked at envisaging it. Now it had come,
with no particular thrill, and was over. Perhaps the lack of
thrill was because we still were so far from freedom. The
war had long ago caught us up, spilled us into imprisonment
and passed on. Fighting had been distant and unreal, like
the new peace.
I rose and walked the length of camp to the hospital to
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see how patients were taking the news. They were far more
emotional than their healthier fellow prisoners.
Three beri-beri patients were “dancing” in the aisle —
strutting grotesquely up and down, performing stiff g>Ta-
tions on their swollen limbs. Those who could not walk lay
in their beds, some laughing, some cr)ing, a few singing.
Andrew Carruthers, 27, radio announcer for the Malayan
Broadcasting Corporation, who had been a prime organizer
of our pre-Muntok shows, was ciying. Tears streamed
down his beri beri swollen face. He said he was crying both
from happiness and pain.
“Now I will get well,” he said. “Soon the Allied soldiers
will be here with medicine to save me. They surely will.
I’m so happy.”
When I first saw Carruthers, standing in line on my first
roll call in Palembang Jail, he had been a slender, grace-
fully formed chap. Now, the last roll call had sounded and,
except for his eyes and voice and shining hope, he was
nearly unrecognizable.
Other men were lying there as badly off as Carruthers,
but I remember him best because of his shining hope.
“I’ll recover in no time,” he said, “as soon as the Allies
arrive with vitamin injections.”
But one day followed another and no Allies came. We
were too far from any^where.
Carruthers’ wife came from the Women’s Camp to find
her husband. She shuddered, halted and closed her eyes
when she entered our thatch-roofed hospital. Quickly, how-
ever, she recovered herself and walked down the aisle toward
her husband’s bed on the other end of the ward. She passed
the patients who had both beri-beri and dysentery, each one
of them a sodden, living stench. Their eyes were slits in
swollen, putty-colored faces. Serum oozed through rag
bandages, soaked blankets of rice sacking, and dripped
through bamboo bed slats to the earthen floor. It was as
though their bodies were inexhaustible reservoirs whose
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contents were being forced by hydraulic pressure through
distended skins.
Since February, 1942, Mrs. Carruthers had waited for this
moment. Through three years and a half of misery she had
anticipated their reunion when the war was over. And her
husband too. Now it had come and she was walking to
meet him, the last man in a row of beri-beri cases.
Attendants had managed to prop him up a little bit, so
he was not lying flat. She reached his bed and smiled
and kissed him.
“Don’t worry, now,” he told her. “I’m going to be all
right. Vitamin injections are all I need and the Allies will
have those when they come.”
Four paratroopers,* three Dutch and one Chinese,
dropped to locate prison camps, found us September 6th.
They said hostilities had ceased three weeks before on
August 15th. They radioed our location to their head-
quarters across the Indian Ocean in Colombo, Ceylon.
Planes flew up from the Cocos Islands about eight hun-
dred miles away, in the Indian Ocean, and dropped food
and medicine. But it was too late to save six men, including
Carruthers. He died September 9th, still bright with hope
and with his wife beside him.
* The paratroopers, working with British forces, were members of the
Korps Insulinde of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. Theii names:
Regimental Sergeant-Major Hakkenberg, Corps Officer Wilhelm, Sergeant
Van Hasselt, and the Chinese officer. Suet. Twenty paratroopers. Sown
from Colombo, Ceylon, and dropped at five key points of Sumatra, “occu-
pied” the entire island, sixth largest in the world.
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New Brews in Old Bottles
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A SIDE from G.I. Joe,” said the Dutch para-
troopers who found our Belalau Camp, “they
X A- say three things won the war: the Dakota,
the Jeep and penicillin.”
They were talking strange jargon from another world.
Who or what was G.I. Joe? And a Jeep? A Dakota and
penicillin? They told of other wonders, of such incongruities
as radar and jet propulsion and rocket bombs. And of that
“inhuman” weapon of which Seki had spoken, the atom
bomb.
They confirmed rumors we had heard that Hitler and
Mussolini were dead and answered another question that
had puzzled us ever since the Japanese themselves informed
us President Roosevelt had died. Who was Truman?
“Rip Van Winkle II” the paratroopers dubbed me when
I fired questions about things that made them laugh, they
were so old to them and new to me.
When the paratroopers walked into camp they found
about half the living inmates were walking skeletons, a
quarter cast respectable shadows and some even were fat.
Statistically our mortality rate was difficult to estimate
because the Dutch population had fluctuated radically as
we moved from place to place. An over all figure for Dutch
deaths based on the highest number of Hollanders in camp
at any one time, would be slightly over 38 percent. The
British mortality rate was easy to figure: of 200 originally in
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Palembang Jail, 109 died, for a score of 54 V2 percent. Of
the 200 men who joined us in Muntok from Pangkal
Pinang, the death rate was nearly 60 percent.
The appearance of the Women's Camp appalled us when
we reached there but the women, statistically, had survived
better than the men. Thirty per cent of British women had
died and twenty per cent of the Dutch.
Higher mortality rates for the British in both camps
were attributed to the fact that the English had two strikes
against them initially. Most had been shipwrecked and
come ashore penniless and without belongings to trade for
food in prison camp. Also they were not as adept at survival
as the Dutch.
Women doctors attributed the generally lower death
rates in the Women's Camp to three things: first, nurses
to care for the sick; second, slightly better food and treat-
ment, although this item would be highly debatable; and
third, mental vitality.
There were numerous stories of women having been
slapped by irritated guards, of having been punished for
rules infractions by being made to stand at attention in
the yard when mosquitoes were thickest in the early eve-
ning, or of having been made to cultivate gardens in the
hottest part of the day. However, there was not a single
instance of women being otherwise molested by the Jap-
anese. The women doctors and the British and Dutch
Camp Leaders said the same thing on that score:
'‘The Japanese officers and guards never made improper
advances to us. Only women who wanted to flirt were
flirted with."
Leader of the Dutch women was the nun. Mother Lau-
rentia, while the leader of the British women was the only
American in camp, Milwaukee-born Mrs. Gertrude B.
Hinch, wife of the head master of the Anglo-Chinese school
in Singapore.
Neither men nor women had atrocity stories to relate.
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unless Japanese utter neglect and indifference in allowing us
to starve in a land of plenty could be called an atrocity.
When I saw the hunger-stunted children in the Women’s
Camp I believed it could.
When the paratroopers told us of other prison camps,
like the German-run horror holes of Dachau and Belsen, I
decided that instead of having suffered hell, as we thought
we had, our experience had been only purgatorial.
In the Women’s Camp I quickly found the three Colijn
girls who, with their father, had shared my shipwreck
adventures. Antoinette had fully recovered from her ma-
chine gun wounds. Allette was a woman, in contrast to the
girl I remembered. Helen, the oldest, was but a shadow of
the young woman who had pulled an oar in our lifeboat.
She was in the hospital, yellow with jaundice and malaria
and suffering skin sores. However, her condition was not
critical and she was recovering rapidly as a result of Jap-
anese medicine and food.
Anxious to atone for their neglect, the Japanese flooded
both camps with food, medicine and clothing. They sent
doctors and “Red Cross” men. One of the “Red Cross”
men was recognized by former victims as a Kempeitai
oflBcer who had grilled them in Pangkal Pinang.
After September 13th British planes showered us almost
daily with parachute packages in metal cylinders. Although
several such packages crashed through barrack roofs onto
sleeping benches no one was injured. The crew of one plane
attached a puckish note telling of elections in England
and ending with:
“What do you think of the labour government?”
Thus we learned Churchill and his cabinet had fallen.
Strangest contribution to our ever growing pile of supplies
was cloth— bolts and bolts of cloth the Japanese had been
hoarding. We promptly traded all the cloth, and most of
the Japanese army clothing issued to us, for chickens, ducks
and fish. We scoured the countryside in search of meat.
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Welcome as were the parachuted tinned goods they were
not fresh meat, which we craved more than anything else.
We visited our Javanese friends of Petanahan. Many of
them had just been liberated from the Kempeitai prison
in Loeboek Linggau. They showed us scars from the beat-
ings they suffered when their inquisitors tried to learn
names of internees with whom they had traded. Mangoen,
the head man, was in bad shape.
I spent half a night sitting in Mangoen’s hall talking
with Javanese farmers who wanted to hear about America
and to know what I thought would happen to them now
that the war was over. My Malay was not good enough for
a political discussion but one man, whom I had not met
before and who spoke a little English, helped bridge the
language gap.
While we smoked raw tobacco, drank black coffee,
munched fried ubi kayu chips and talked, the others lis-
tened intently and occasionally put questions. Their spokes-
man wanted to know if now the Indonesians would be
regarded as equals by Dutch, British and Americans.
My answers were vague. I believed they would find little
difference in the attitude of white men toward them but
I did not like to say so. On the other hand I also was deter-
mined not to tell any lies just to make them happy. So I
mumbled about the Atlantic Charter and its four freedoms
and guarantees for self determination of peoples.
I felt ashamed when I mentioned the charter because I
did not believe its guarantees were worth the paper they
had been written on. Apparently the spokesman did not
either for he said, in effect,
“If we Indonesians are treated as inferior people after
the war the same as before there will be trouble."
One question the colonists of Petanahan asked over and
over: “When are the Americans coming?"
“When the Americans come" seemed to be a millenium
they expected and eagerly awaited. Maybe that was why
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they treated me so cordially. They made me feel they liked
me. I know I liked them.
About midnight I left Mangoen's house. Radi, waving
a blazing torch, led me to Barto’s where earlier in the day
I had feasted on chicken, rice and coconut pudding. Rain
was falling but not hard enough to extinguish the torch.
My bed that night was in a recess just below the eaves of
Barto’s house. It was reached by a ladder from the chicken
yard and, although theoretically protected from the ele-
ments by the roof and by being on the leeward side of the
house, was open to anything which might blow contrary to
the prevailing wind. Since my clothing was wet and the bed-
ding consisted only of the straw mat on which I lay, all the
breezes felt contrary.
Next morning I spent trading around Petanahan and
acquired six chickens. When I started back to camp Radi
and his wife begged me to do something for their only
child, a malaria withered infant of ten months, but so tiny
he looked about two. Each of their previous three children
had died in infancy of malaria. Could I not save this one?
“We will take him to the doctors in camp," I said.
A heavy thunder shower drenched us before we had gone
half way. The baby was wrapped in a tarpaulin to keep
dry. We slipped and slithered along the same trail I had
traveled with Mandang on our smuggling trips. Now, how-
ever, the fallen trees had been removed. I wondered how
we used to make it in the dark.
Japanese sentries stopped us at the front gate. Natives
were not allowed inside camp. (A few days later, however,
ragged natives entered in droves to trade. )
“Baby dying!" I shouted in Malay, and brushed past the
's wife, who was carrying the infant, was too fright-
ened to follow. She was an undernourished wisp of a thing
less than five feet tall and nervously chewing betel nut. The
thunder shower had chilled her and now she was beginning
guards.
Radi
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to shiver from incipient malaria that broke out on slightest
provocation. I seized her arm and dragged her past the
sentries. They protested feebly but made no further eflEort
to stop us.
Doctor Kampschuur was as startled as the sentries when
I walked into his quarters with the woman and child. How-
ever, he gave her special quinine for infants and ordinary
quinine for herself.
Eric and I went to Petanahan a week later with more
quinine and some cod liver oil. When he gave it to me
Kampschuur said,
“I am afraid it is no use because that child has had
chronic malaria too long."
He guessed correctly. We arrived at Radi’s house to learn
the baby had died. We gave presents of cloth and tinned
butter, issued by the Japanese, to Radi, Barto, Ali and their
wives. It happened to be the first day of the Moslem New
Year. In every Javanese hut was open house and on every
table were cakes and sweets, coffee and tobacco. They were
unbelievably poor, those Javanese farmers, but they were
rich in hospitality.
On my last afternoon in camp I paid a farewell call to
the cemetery m the rubber trees with its ninety-five graves.
There lay Kendall, who had succeeded Old Pop as ward
matron; Phillips who had posted the 25,000 guilder wager
offer that we would be free by January 1, 1944 (he died
July 1945, when freedom was so near); Carruthers of the
shining hope; Allen, my first cell mate; Father Bakker and
the man he had tried so hard to save. Monsignor Bouma,
Vicar Apostolic of Bangka Island.
Unless these graves were constantly tended they soon
would be covered by advancing undergrowth. The cem-
eteries of Muntok and Palembang were better off in that
respect. They were in city burial grounds.
That night I said goodbye to my best smuggling cus-
tomer, Bishop Mekkelholt.
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“If you are able/’ the Bishop asked, “please send us some
wheat flour for communion hosts and some altar wine.”
Sacramental wine and hosts are necessary for celebration
of Mass. The priests had managed to say Mass daily for over
three years by rationing their wine supply with an eye drop-
per and dividing hosts into fractional particles. The supplies
and the war ended almost simultaneously. I promised to
send wine and wheat flour from the first place they could
be found.
Father Elling who, burning with malarial fever, lay
nearby in his bedspace on the floor, sat up to wish me luck.
He said something about the future of the missions.
“You’d better return to Holland and recover your health
and then think about the missions,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Now is when the natives need us.”
The following afternoon, September 19th, a month and
four days after V-J Day, Australian planes flew us back to
the world we had left in 1942. We landed in Singapore. In
the airport canteen Eric met Lloyd, the other man who
escaped from the Japanese executioners on the shore of
Bangka Island. The two had met before, when they con-
gratulated each other in Muntok Prison shortly after that
macabre beach party in February, 1942. Now they ex-
changed congratulations on their second identical escape—
this time from prison camp.
I found Doc West * in the Raffles Hotel. He was worn
from dysentery but on his feet. Conditions in the Palem-
bang military camp, where he was taken from Muntok
Prison, had been considerably better than in Muntok, he
said, until the last quarter of 1944; after that they deteri-
orated rapidly. Beginning in May, 1945, the Japanese pur-
sued a deliberate policy of wiping out the military prisoners
by starvation. Rations were drastically and systematically
* For his services to military prisoners of war and civilian internees in
Muntok and Palembang, Dr. West was decorated after the war with the
Order of the British Empire.
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cut in graduating percentages during May, June, July and
August. Survivors were to have been massacred by machine
gun in a barbed wire stockade on August 27th, according to
a friendly Korean guard who kept prisoners informed of
Japanese plans for them. The stockade was built and prep-
arations for the execution were going forward when libera-
tion came.*
More than anything else in Singapore, even more than a
glass of fresh milk and a dish of ice cream, I wanted to find
the Press Relations Office and start sending cables. When
I found it I felt I was back in civilization. At last I could
relax. In a cloth belt worn next to my skin I had been carry-
ing the most essential of the notes transcribed after I buried
my diaries in 1943. Also in the belt were my passport and
press credentials which I managed to save through every-
thing, including swimming in the sea. Feeling secure among
friends I removed the belt and put it in a little sack con-
taining my recent diaries and other possessions, then went
to work writing cables. Someone, probably a hungry Chi-
nese messenger, took the sack. It was found later in a gar-
bage can minus the belt, notes and credentials. Luckily,
however, two diary notebooks still were there.
A few days later two plane loads of American correspond-
ents arrived in Singapore. Among them were several friends
of my Tokyo and Shanghai days and Vern Haugland of
Associated Press whom I had known at home in Salt Lake
City. When I told Vern of my buried diaries in Sumatra
and my recently stolen notes he and other correspondents
arranged to fly me to Palembang to dig them up.
The plane which brought us there was the first American
craft to land in Palembang after V-J Day. It caused quite
a stir. The Japanese who, ironically, now were policing
* Japanese officers and non-commissioned officers in charge of military
camp in Palembang were tried by a British tribunal in Singapore and were
executed. A Dutch War Crimes tribunal in Sumatra tried Japanese in
charge of civilian internees and sentenced Seki to fifteen years and the
commander of the Women’s Camp to six years.
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Sumatra under Allied supervision, because there were no
Allied troops for that purpose, supplied us automobile
transportation into town.
We stopped first at Charitas Hospital which had been
opened that day, September 28th, by Mother Alacoque
who had survived her term of Kempeitai imprisonment. She
said she was alive because one of the Indonesian jailers had
smuggled food to her “and by God's grace I did not get
dysentery.”
The medicines and bandages the nuns had given native
friends in Palembang to hide until the war’s end were
returned and made possible the re-opening.
Bishop Mekkelholt greeted us. He was wearing a glisten-
ing white cassock. Around his waist was a crimson sash
similar to the one I had lost on a smuggling trip. I handed
him a package containing altar wine and wheat flour for
communion hosts that had been flown to a Singapore
church from Australia. For the first time in our long ac-
quaintance he was at a loss for words. Father van Gis-
bergen, the newspaper translator, was there, too, grinning
like the proverbial Cheshire cat. Father Filing was still in
Belalau.
We drove to Palembang's principal hotel. In the airy
lobby, from which Japanese officers had been ousted a few
days before, sat the oil men, Oosten, De Bruyn and others.
While the correspondents visited the Shell and Standard
refineries outside Palembang to survey the accuracy of
Allied bombing, I went after my diaries.
Oosten and another oil man named Schoorel went along
with me. Our bodyguards were Colonel C. A. Coltharp,
pilot of the plane that brought me, and Lieutenant V. W.
Pennanen. We found Barracks Camp, where the diaries
were buried, a shambles. After the men had been trans-
ferred to Muntok, in September, 1943, the women had
been moved into Banacks Camp. When the women also
were taken to Bangka Island, the camp had been turned
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into a Japanese truck depot. Some barracks had been de-
molished but the floor of the hospital was still intact. I
measured off twenty-seven feet from what had been the
bathroom corner, dug under the foundation and found the
first bottle.
By this time Japanese soldiers, some of whom had been
our former guards, had arrived on the scene. They watched
intently but made no move to interfere. The Allies, as
personified by Colonel Coltharp and Lieutenant Pennanen,
both armed, were masters now.
Three feet beyond the first bottle I dug again and
found the second. Another three feet and the cylindrical
tin containing Camp News was uncovered. The first layer
of tin had rusted through but the second layer was intact.
Koot had insulated the container well. It had been buried
a month over two years. The bottles were undamaged and
the diaries in perfect condition.
Oosten and Schoorel returned to the hotel. Coltharp,
Pennanen and I directed the chauffeur to drive to Palem-
bang Jail.
‘‘Open up,” we ordered the Japanese jailer.
He swung open the iron gates which had received me
the night of Easter Sunday, April 5, 1942. Instinctively I
glanced up over the gate, as I had done that first sickening
night, and saw the date “a.d. 1883.”
The jail had been refurbished. The barbed wire dividing
the yard into sections was fresh and taut. The cell doors
which we had removed to use as bed frames and for other
purposes had been replaced and were closed and locked.
Behind them, at rigid attention, stood thin, ragged, dafk-
skinned prisoners, Malay, Chinese, Ambonese. Tbey were
utterly quiet. We stood for a moment stunned by the
impact of the place. It was worse than I remembered it.
Coltharp voiced my feelings when he said, “This is hor-
rible.”
Just like the Japanese officers who had inspected us as
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prisoners in this same jail while we stood at rigid attention,
Coltharp, Pennanen and I walked around the jail inspecting
the prisoners who now stood where once I had stood. I
thought I knew something of what they felt. And I was
sick inside. Had they been our recent Japanese captors I
might have gloated. But they were not. They were poor,
forgotten natives who had been here since heaven knew
when and who were still here more than a month after the
war ended. I turned to the jailer, who was keeping a re-
spectful distance.
‘Tor what are these men being held?"
“Murder. Theft. Lawbreaking."
“Where are the political prisoners?"
“We have none."
I did not believe him but could prove nothing contrary.
“How long have they been here?"
He shrugged.
I looked over the little hedge into what once had been
the clinic where Allen and I had lived, and into the other
room where dysentery patients had lain with Old Pop min-
istering to them. Women were there now, hollow cheeked,
staring. The rooms had reverted to their pre-war status as
quarters for female prisoners. The clock had spun around
four years lacking two months and eleven days since Pearl
Harbor and the hands were right back where they had
started, as far as Palembang Jail was concerned.
In the rear of the jail we found a dozen emaciated pris-
oners sitting on mats on the covered walk, I stared at them
and then at the jailer.
“Dysentery," he said.
The cycle was complete.
Suddenly one of the human wrecks spoke in English.
“Help me, in the name of God, please help me."
The only help we could give him was to ask his name,
which was Li Tai Sun, and give it to the British and Dutch
prisoner of war teams now in charge of Palembang. Li Tai
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Sun was a Chinese from Penang, Malaya. He said he had
been a lorry driver in the British defense corps during
1941-42 fighting in Malaya and had come to Sumatra from
Singapore as a “volunteer" in a Japanese sponsored “Peo-
ple’s Army" work unit. In Palembang he had deserted. I
asked him,
“Will the jailer beat you for having spoken to us?"
“I don’t know. Probably."
I warned the jailer,
“Don’t harm this man. We are coming back for him."
Actually we could neither come back for him nor take
him with us. He was too sick to care for himself and he had
no friends to care for him in the city outside. We could
not take a dysentery-ridden man in a crowded plane to
Singapore. We could only appeal to the compassion of
harried Allied officers to investigate this jail and its native
prisoners and do something for Li Tai Sun.
“It’s getting late,” said Coltharp. “We’ve got to make
Singapore before dark."
Pennanen had a camera. He took some pictures and we
walked toward the gate.
Strange, I thought, this place now is so grim. In Muntok
and Belalau we had looked back on Palembang Jail as our
time of prosperity. The present prisoners were less crowded
than we had been. Maybe it was their air of silent hopeless-
ness that now made the jail so forbidding; that, and the
locked cell doors.
The jailer opened the inner gates for us and closed them
while we stood in the corridor. The outer gates were opened;
we stepped through and they clanged shut behind us. We
walked to the waiting automobile. Two Japanese officers
passing by snapped to attention and saluted us. We re-
turned the salute, climbed into the car and were driven to
the airport.
I gave Li Tai Sun’s name to a Dutch officer who promised
to investigate.
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The correspondents had returned from inspecting the
refineries. They said Allied bombing had done compara-
tively little damage. Although much of the Standard plant
had been destroyed by its American operators prior to Jap-
anese occupation, the Japanese had combined the two
plants and claimed to have operated them at about one-
third capacity to the end of the war.
We climbed into the bomber. It roared down the runway
which had been extended by British and Dutch military
prisoners under Japanese direction. The plane rose, circled
Palembang, the refineries, followed the course of the Moesi
river to the Bangka Straits and headed north for Singapore.
Now I was leaving Sumatra, home of little brown men
toiling in ladangs, of the Tuan Besar— literally, Mr. Big—
as colonial big shots are called by natives, and of King
Kong, monstrous ape of the silent movie era. The things
I had seen and done in that land below me now seemed as
distant and unreal as the King Kong thrill picture of so
many years ago. I had to look at my malaria yellowed hands
to make the immediate past seem true.
King Kong, you may remember, was a Hollywood version
of the orang-utan, a genuine anthropoid ape that lives in
Sumatra’s jungles. I wondered what Hollywood would do
with another Sumatra denizen, the Tuan Besar.
Had the war changed him? True, the prison camps had
shrunk his paunch until it was little more than a series of
wrinkles over a bony pelvis. But had his mind shrunk with
it or had the experience given new breadth to his thinking
and his values? For three and one-half years he had slept
cheek by jowl with all manner of men. Now he knew what
it was to hunger and live on the ragged edge of poverty.
Would the experience influence his dealings with the little
brown men who had known poverty for centuries? Or would
he try to climb back on his pedestal and expect the little
brown men to support him once more in style to which the
Tuan Besar for generations had been accustomed? I was
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afraid many Tuans would try to resume the pedestals, with
disastrous consequences to themselves and their colonial
world.
There had been exceptions among the Tuans. Some
minds and hearts had expanded to such proportions as to
transform their owners into enlightened human beings. But
I was afraid their voices would not be heard in the clamor
for guilders and dollars.
Nor would the fault lie entirely with the colonials. Al-
ready there were ominous signs from Indonesian extremists.
Correspondents had told me that in Java the newly self-
proclaimed Indonesian Republic was holding as hostages
the Dutch internees who had spent the war looking forward
to Allied liberation. The internees still were prisoners, but
of the Indonesians. Having seen the Haihos I shuddered to
think what they would do when under no restraint. They
had all the makings of first class gangsters.
Already it looked as if the liberation and the forces it had
released would only breed more hates.
I was glad I had met some good men, both white and
dark, to remember when hate stoked the furnaces of dis-
cord.
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T he road back to life from the peculiar burial
that was internment really began in Singapore.
There I fattened up for a week at an army mess
to which I was brought by Captain Gunnar Larson, the first
American I met on arriving from prison camp. Larson was
on hand again when I returned from digging up my diaries.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing my arm and rushing me
to a squat, stripped-down vehicle with the strange name
)eep, “we’re going to the airport. You’ve got a plane ride
to Calcutta.”
My teeth rattled while the rolling box jolted along the
airport road. I had been seeing Jeeps for a week but still
they looked— and felt — unreal.
Across the Bay of Bengal I flew to India. In Calcutta’s
Great Eastern Hotel I met, by chance. Lieutenant Colonel
B. C. Bowker, public relations officer for the party of John
J. McCloy, then United States Assistant Secretary of War
and later president of the International Bank for Recon-
struction and Development, known as the World Bank.
Bowker introduced me to McCloy who was flying around
the world inspecting American war theaters. He offered to
take me home. Few things could have pleased me more
The trip would retrace the journey I had taken in the oppo
site direction so long ago ... up through China, over to
Japan and across the Pacific . . . and bring me home jusi
six years after my departure.
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We left Calcutta, flew over the green hell that is
upper Burma, hopped The Hump to Kunming and went
on to China's war time capital, Chungking. There I walked
into the Press Hostel, rickety haven for correspondents,
where I had stayed a few days in 1942 after escaping from
Shanghai. Maurice Votaw, doyen of the place, gaped as at
a ghost, saying,
“You're dead, at least we thought you were."
Hugh Baillie, president of United Press, was interviewing
Chiang Kai-shek at the Generalissimo's residence where the
McCloy party stopped overnight.
“We had written you off," said Baillie. “After your folks
received a P.O.W. card from you in 1943 we checked
Tokyo through the International Red Cross and were in-
formed that your name no longer was on the roster of
internees in Sumatra. To us that meant you had died."
“I'll sure enjoy reading my obituary," I said.
Baillie laughed, and said, “You won't have any trouble
finding it."
We took off for Shanghai. As the mountains disappeared
beneath us and we found ourselves above China's coastal
plain, I spotted Lake Tai and the thin lines that were the
railroad and highway across which Martin, Lee and I had
escaped to Free China in the Christmas-New Year season
of 1941-42. In Shanghai I was greeted again as a man from
the grave.
“It can't be you," said the priest who had loaned me his
Christmas collection to finance our escape. “You were killed
in Java."
“It's my ghost," I said, “come to return your loan."
Northward flew McCloy's plane over familiar country
which first unrolled beneath my eyes from a passenger
plane in 1941. Rivers, lakes and canals glistened in the great
delta that is coastal China. In late afternoon we sighted
China's northern mountains and soon were over the walled
ramparts of majestic Peiping which lies just south of the
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mountains at the edge of the plain. Instead of landing im-
mediately at Peiping we continued on in order to wing
along the Great Wall, following its endless writhings west-
ward over barren, sunbaked mountains which stretch into
infinity like burned, brown waves in a boundless sea.
Hardly a better time of day could have been chosen for
viewing that ancient Wonder of the World. A lowering
sun in a bronze-blue sky etched in bold relief the desolate,
windswept mountains that form a natural northern barrier
to the China plains. The Wall twists along the very crest
of the east-west chain, topping peaks, descending precipi-
tous slopes and ascending cliff-like gradients. At intervals
are lonely watch towers from which once might have sped
arrows into besieging hordes.
Parts of the wall have crumbled and look as though a
man easily could climb over the rubble, but we saw few
such places. The wall had been rebuilt and repaired through
the centuries. Most of what we saw stands as firmly as when
Shih Huang-ti began it 2,100 years ago. Even from our
height the wall looked high, wide, massive, formidable.
Occasionally, where it crosses the floors of narrow canyons
or high defiles, are gates through which pass tortuous rib-
bons that arc caravan trails. Through one gate a truck
crowded a string of camels, outward bound.
It has been said that China’s Great Wall is the only
man-made thing on earth which could be seen from Mars.
Only a few days previously, at the southern end of China,
we had stood on the terminus of another man-made won-
der— the incredible, 2,200 mile oil pipe line from Calcutta
to Kunming.
On that occasion the McCloy party had been driven from
teeming Kunming to the quiet hillside that once was a
Chinese cemetery and now held the tanks and valves mark-
ing the end of the mighty line which stretched southward
toward the canyons of The Hump and disappeared like an
interminable snake wriggling through the hills. As we had
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gazed on the line, thinking of what it represented, a mem-
ber of our party, Dr. Douglas S. Freeman, Pulitzer Prize
biographer of General Robert E. Lee, remarked,
'This is an historic spot in the logistics of war.”
I had wondered how long the line would last and for
whom it would be used, if at all, now that the war which
caused it was finished.
At opposite ends of China man had wrought wonders
with steel and stone. The Great Wall had been another
historic landmark in the logistics of war.
When the pipeline has disappeared so completely it no
longer even is a footnote in China’s history, the Wall will
still be there. And when the Wall is gone, consumed by
Time, what will remain? The souls of the builders.
Thoughts. Words. Only the non-material is permanent. If
the Wall could talk would it weep or laugh at men who
tried to keep other men behind a wall?
After Peiping, Japan was our next stop. McCloy’s itiner-
ary included an examination of Omori Camp on the shores
of Yokohama Bay where Allied prisoners had suffered
through the war. Now it held high ranking Japanese sched-
uled for war crimes trials. Here, I thought as we entered,
is my chance to inspect row on row of the kind of men
who once inspected me. Obviously cleaned and repaired
since Allied prisoners vacated, Omori was nearly empty
and neat as a pin. Only twenty-four Japanese had been col-
lected in it thus far and they were comfortably ensconced
with mats and blankets in wooden barracks. The officer in
charge said that the new Japanese prisoners were given
exactly the same blankets and food that were given to
Allied prisoners.
"The only difference,” he said, "is that we keep the
place clean.”
Seated at a desk, writing, was a man of familiar figure
and visage. A member of our party. Marine Corps Colonel
Chauncey G. Parker, Jr., startled at meeting face to face
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the one man whom he had never expected to see, ex-
claimed,
“Tojo!”
Japan's once supreme war lord and Premier, who vainly
had attempted suicide and was now recovered, bowed his
head slightly and replied,
“Tojo! Yes!"
General Homma of the Bataan Death March was there;
and also General Kenji Doihara, that arch conspirator of
North Ghina intrigue.
“How does this compare with your Sumatra camps?”
asked Lieutenant Golonel Bowker.
“It is nearly a palace," I told him.
At Eighth Army headquarters I saw my first American
soldiers on parade since the Marines left Shanghai in 1941,
just before the curtain fell on the white man's era in Ghina.
While the band played “The Old Grey Mare," young men
in khaki strode by, their arms swinging rhythmically, their
feet in solid step, their helmeted heads high, and over them
the colors flying. The thrill of pride as I watched was some-
thing akin to the stir of patriotism on that Fourth of July,
1942, in Palembang Jail when black-bearded Allen raised
his tin cup and said,
“Gentlemen, I give you the President of the United
States of America. . . ."
Almost everywhere the plane stopped along the way—
Ghungking, Shanghai, Peiping— friends who had greeted
me as one returned from the dead, in their next breath
would tell me of some friend or acquaintance of pre-war
days who was dead beyond doubt. It was the same in Tokyo.
There I learned for certain that of the six correspondents
who had remained in Java to cover the last days of fighting
on that beleaguered island in March, 1942, only one sur-
vived. Me. The fate of another I already knew because we
had looked at death together and he lost. DeWitt Han-
cock, of Associated Press, went down with the ship on
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which I was sunk in the Indian Ocean. The other four
correspondents, three Englishmen and an Australian, simply
disappeared when Java fell.
As McCloy's plane flew from Tokyo to I wo Jima I
thought of those correspondents who were not coming
home. They were gone now, every one, along with Allen
and Colijn and Father Bakker and all those others lying
beneath the pepper trees of Bangka and the rubber trees
of Sumatra.
The plane landed at I wo Jima and in a little while I was
standing where the Marines had raised the flag atop Mt.
Suribachi, leaning into the stiff Pacific wind which whips
eternally over that great pile of dead volcanic spew, and
gazing over I wo Jima’s blood soaked desolation. So many
others had died here too, thousands of them, American
and Japanese. And this was only a little, sulphurous, surf
beaten island ... a cinderous pin point in the war I had
come East to cover and missed. I felt empty inside at hav-
ing missed so much. Yet, with the emptiness there was an
indefinable sense of fulfillment. A feeling of loss coupled
with one of gain. As though a part of me had died giving
birth to another life.
I had been in a different kind of war, a battle of souls
and minds instead of bullets and bombs. During the fight-
ing I had explored the heart of my fellow man but, most
important of all, I had searched my own soul and found
myself. The missing years had not been a total loss.
I felt that the Lord had been with me at various times
and places of that circuit of the unfathomable which is
Asia— from the day the Japanese occupied Shanghai to
this moment standing on Suribachi's summit and wonder-
ing how the Marines ever scaled it in the face of fire.
I thought of Father Bakker 's request for a special prayer
should I ever reach I wo Jima, so I said it while looking
down on the ugliness of East Beach. The prayer was for
him and for the Japanese, as he had asked. I added a few
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
BY EASTERN WINDOWS
342
thanksgivings too . . . thanksgivings for the indomitable
courage that took Marines up Suribachi's sides, and for
another kind of courage that shone in such widely difFerent
ways as—
The words of the poem quoted by Churchill.
The plea of Bishop Mekkelholt in behalf of a man
I despised, ^‘Please give him the quinine, Mac. It is
not for you or me to judge the value of a life.’*
The request of a dying priest to pray for the men
who killed him.
As I gazed over battle-scarred Iwo Jima and thought of
all it represented in the turbulent affairs of men, I realized
what 1 had learned during the missing years— the only
answer to war. Father Bakker and the Bishop had lived the
answer, because they had lived the commandments: “Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with
thy whole soul and with thy whole mind . . . and . . .
thy neighbor as thyself.”
Conference tables and peace treaties and international
covenants mean nothing as long as one man hates another.
If I hate the Japanese because of what happened in Suma-
tra, or if they hate me because my country crushed them,
there can be no peace, only a truce.
The first job is to stop hating. But hate does not cease
because it is willed to cease. Something else just as solid
and powerful has to push out hate and fill the place it
occupied. That is the biggest and the hardest job— filling
the vacancy with positive action. For the replacement must
live and breathe and burn as fiercely for the good of man
as does hate for his destruction. What shall we call the
replacement? Christ called it love.
If I can get on my knees tonight and, with a full heart,
pray,
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
RETURN
343
“God, please help Seki and his interpreter— and have
mercy on To jo, too,"
Then my private battle against hate is half won. The
other half will be continuing in this prayer every day. When
all the men of all the earth do that for one another there
will be no more war. And until they do, war is inevitable.
There is no possible disarmament except in the hearts
of men.
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
INDEX
Ai Koku Koshin Kyoku, 70, 71
“Air Corps Patriotic March,”
Japanese, 70, 71
Alacoque, Mother, 52-54 57, 135-
137. 330
Albert, Frenchman named, 189,
190
Ali, 286, 287, 292, 327
Ali, Mrs., 292, 300
Allen, W. Probyn, 3, 4, 7, 19, 42,
48, 61, 63, 65, 71, 76, 92-94,
99-105 passim, 120, 121, 158,
1 71, 183, 272-274, 296, 297,
327, 340
Ambonese, the, 55, 13 1 ff.
American Red Cross, the, 219
Attenborough, Bill, 66, 124
Aubrcy-Scott, E. M. C., 19 1, 192
Baillie, Hugh, 337
Bakker, Father Benedictus, 1-4, 7,
9, 102, 104, 106, 200, 21 1, 250,
252, 253, 31 1 ff., 327, 341, 342
Bali, 1 17
Balikpapan, 97
Bangka Island, i, 136, 138, 145,
158, 166, 203
Ban^ta Straits, 156-166
Bangka Tin Winning, 164, 19 1,
193
Banks, Dishwasher, 175
Barracks Camp, 1 09 ff ., 1 20 ff.,
214, 330
Barto, Petanahan farmer, 286 ff.,
326, 327
Bcesley, Dr. Stephen H., 227, 228
Beissel, Chief Cook, see von Gym-
nich
Belalau, 262-275, 276-302, 303 ff.,
313 ff.; at news of peace, 317-
321, 322 ff.
Bernhard, Prince, birthday of, 99
Boerma, A. P. A., 1 71-173, 208
Bolle, Indo-European named, 277
Boswell, Norman, 178
Bouma, Monsignor, 200, 313, 327
Bowdon, Vivien Gordon, 162
Bowker, Lt. Col. B. G., 336, 340
Breet, Anton, 278
Breuer, Max, 195, 278, 292, 293
Brinker, Old, 1-9 passim, 14, 252,
.?54
British, the, prisoner mortality rate
of, 322, 323
Bryant, George, 238, 240
Buchanan, Indo-Euroj>ean oil
worker named, 235
Bukum Island, 141
Bullwinkle, Vivian, 154, 164
“Bunny,” 207, 208
Buridge, Mr. and Mrs., 14 1, 146,
153. 154
Burt, Gordon, 27, 28, 31, 43-45,
65, 87, 88, 257
Calcutta, India, 336
“Camp News,” 80-82, 85 ff., 105,
i 34 » 331
Carruthers, Andrew, 124, 320, 321,
327
Carruthers, Mrs. Andrew, 320, 321
Charitas, 49 ff., 135, 330
Chinese, the, in Palembang, 131,
132; paratrooper, 321
Christie, Canadian named, 65, 66,
124, 180
Christmas, 1941, ii; 1942, 97, 98,
100-106, 254; 1943, 179, 253;
1944, i-ii, 14, 15, 252 ff., 313
Chungking, 13, 337
Churchill, Winston, 31 1 ff., 324,
342
345
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Original from
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
346
Clark, Knobby, 104
Coliju, Anton H., 60, 97, too, loi,
103, 258, 259, 296, 297
Colijn, Alette, 96-98, loi, 10^,
324
Colijn, Antoinette, 96-98, 101,
103, 263, 324
Colijn, Helen, 96-98, loi, 103, 324
Colombo, Ceylon, paratroopers
from, 321, 322
Coltharp, Col. C. A., 330-333
Congregation of the Sacred Hearts
of Jesus and Mary, 200
Coolies, Chinese, 163
Crumpet, man called, 240, 241
Curran-Sharp, 35, 36, 41, 61, 66,
86, too, 257, 297
Curran-Sharp, Mrs., 135, 257
Cynic, The, 243, 246, 247
Damien, Father, of Molokai, 200
de Bruyn, E. E., 218, 330
de Groot, Peter, 190, 212, 213, 305
de Jong, Roel, 123, 269, 270
de Mey, Controleur, 66, 67
de Raat, Controleur, 67, 166, 170,
176, 219, 220
Deering, John, 226-228
Dogs, 1 13, 1 14, 1 17
Doihara, General Kenji, 340
Donnelly, Australian jockey, 103
Drysdale, J., 79, 86, 114, 115, 141,
168, 232, 257, 304
Dutch, the, 133 ff., 212, 322; para-
troopers, 321, 322
Dutch War Crimes tribunal, 329 n.
Dyken, planter named, 32
Earle, R. E., 172, 173
Elling, Father, 30, 31, 58, 60, 61,
99, 102, 179, 183, 250, 253,
328, 330
Enright, tin miner named, 250
“Evangeline,” 77-79, 94
Everstijn, 99
Fawkes, Guy, 91-94, 222
Flash, seaman nicknamed, 209-2 1 2
INDEX
Fourth of July, the, 99, 296, 297
Fox, the flying, 125
Francken, Officer, 5, 15
Freeman, Dr. Douglas S., 339
Gani, Dr. A. K., 49
George, King, birthday of, 99
Germann, Eric, 10, ii, 14, 41, 65,
99, 100, 124, 139, I , J-155, 164,
180, 2 1 0-2 1 2, 218, 252, 255,
264, 290, 295, 296, 303-310,
318, 319, 327, 328
Geroms, Dutch banker, 133, 134
Geursens, G. J., 255
Giang Bee, the, 156(1.
Gillbrook, Preacher, 21 1
Goldberg-Curth, Dr., 54
Gow, the, 208, 209
Great Wall, China’s, 338, 339
Grixoni, Englishman named, 204,
205
Haihos, 188, 194, 264, 269, 277(1.,
304(1., 317, 335
Hakkenberg, Regimental Sergeant-
Major, 321 n.
Hals, patient called, 238-240
Hamilcar, man called, 243-245
Hammet, H. G., 60, 115, 212, 228,
257, 274
Hancock, De Witt, 340
Harley-Clark, H., 49, 1 20-1 23
Harrison, G. P., 172-174, 177, 178,
180, 222, 232, 258, 314, 315
Hasegawa, Dr., 255
Haugland, Vem, 329
Hildebrand, Burgomaster, 99
Hilling, hospital bookkeeper, 302,
304
Hinch, Mrs. Gertrude B., 323
Hirohito, Emperor, birthday cele-
bration for, 19 1
“Hold That Tiger,” 68
Hollanders, the, in Palembang, 131
Hollweg, Dr., 33, 34, 41, 49, 51, 56,
100, 120, 170-172, 176, 222,
246, 258, 273, 297
Holscher, 35
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
INDEX
347
Homma, General, 340
Hori, Tomokazu, 51
Indian Ocean, the, 107
Indonesians, 134, 188, 192, 325,
335
Iwo Jima, 313, 314, 341, 342
Japanese, the, compared to ants,
73-75; Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde
personality of, 153; propa-
ganda, 266 ff.
Jardine & Matheson, 159
Java, 21
Javanese, the, 133, 261, 325 ff.
JehoSy 302
Jones, J. F., 135
Juliana, Princess, birthday of, 99
Kamakura, 62, 63
Kamphuis, Police Commissioner,
137
Kampschuur, Dr. W., 222, 254,
270, 327
Karloff, Boris, 123, 258
Karman, 292
Karman, Mrs., 292, 293
Kasai, Lt. Gen. H., 13 1
Kempeitai, the, 13 1 ff., 277, 302
Kendall, H. P., 158, 177, 180, 232,
245. 327
Kingsley, soldier named, 146, 153,
154, 164
Koopal, ward attendant, 179, 180
Koot, Nick, 68, 134, 190, 2^, 270,
331
Kramer, Dr. H. P., 222, 238, 239,
270
Lang, Lt. Col., 160-162
Langdon, Lt. E. P. C., 157, 158
Larson, Capt. Gunnar, 336
Laurentia, Mother, loi, 323
Lawson, Harold, 85, 124, 271, 272
Lee, Francis, ii, 107, 182
Lentze, Dr. P. E., 217, 221, 222,
237. 255-258, 260, 314
Li Tai Sun, 332, 333
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Li Woy the, 159, 160
Lloyd, Vyner-Brooke crew mem-
ber, 154, 328
Loeboek Linggau, 261, 277
Louhenapessie, an Ambonese
named, 198, 199, 215, 278
Lubblik-Weddik, Indo-European
named, 133, 136, 137
Magnay, 124
Maier, Resident, 137
Mandang, native of Celebes is-
lands, 278 ff., 293-302, 306
Mangoen, 294, 300, 301, 31:5
Mane, Eurasian hairdresser, 143,
t44, 146
Manung, Australian named, 124
Martin, Jimmy, 157
Martin, Pepper, ii, 12, 107, 182
Mason, H. E. M., 159
Mata Hari, the, 14 1, 162, 163
Maurice, rubber planter named,
206-208
McCann, R. L., 159, 160
McCloy John J., 336 ff
McDoug.ill, William H., Jr, his
private miracle, 107, 108; his
bedroom and morgue, 1 71-174
Mehitabel, the cat, 121, 122, 193
Mekkelholt, Bishop H. M., 26, 32,
49. 50. 52, 55. 56, 137. 200, 216,
222-224, 253, 255, 258, 291,
292, 296, 315, 316, 327, 328,
330. 342
Menadonese, the, 136
Mitbo, Vincent, 249, 250
Moesi River, the, 21, 138, 158
Mt. Suribachi, 341, 342
Muntok, Bangka Island, i, 138,
145. 153. 165
Muntok Prison, 1-15, 138, 153,
163-166, 167-174, 18711., 197,
203 ff., 214 ff., 228 ff., 276, 327,
328
Myndersma, Resident, 137
Napoleon, 63
New Charitas, see Charitas
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
INDEX
348
New Year’s, 1942, 182, 183; 1943,
106, 107; 1944, 180-182; 1945,
255; sacred to the Japanese,
182
“O Great Pacific,” chanty, 68-71
Old Charitas, see Charitas
Omori Camp, 339
“Onward, Christian Soldiers," 249
Oosten, W. H., 59, 97, too, 217,
219, 221, 257, 274, 296, 330,
33*
Oranje, Resident of Palembang,
99, 116, 117, 133, 134. * 72 . 2 * 7 .
261
Palembang, 13, 21, 49, 50, 95, 131,
132, 158, 2fo, 329, 330
Palembang Jail, 13, 16 ff., 25®.,
37 ff., 58 ff., 76^4, 98 ff., 164,
214, 296,327
Pangkal Pinang, 172
Pangkal Pinang Jail, 191, 192, 200
Pangkal Pinangers, 191 ff.
Parker, Col. Chaimcey G., Jr., 339
Paula, Sister, 54
“Peanut,” Japanese Commandant
nicknamed, 168, 180, 190
Peiping, 337, 338
Pennanen, Lt. V. W., 33^33
Penryce, chairman of British com-
mittee, 85-87, 99, 1 13
Petanahan, 285, 286, 292, 294,
297-302, 303, 326
Phillips, M. L., 170, 327
Pladjoe, 50,
Pop, Matron, 45-47, 228-232
Pratt, D. F., 123, 258
Pratt, William Henry, 123
Prince of Wales, the, 159
Quinn, John, 124, 13d
Radi, Petanahan farmer, 286 ff.,
326, 327
Red Cross, the International, 137,
138; the American, 219
Reed, J. G., 163, 164
Repulse, the 159
Richardus, Dutch brother named,
250, 251
Roberts, W. R., 164
Rolffs, Oom Piet (Uncle Peter),
249, 250
“Roll Out the Barrel,” 68
Rombeek, Jan, 80
Ronkes-Agerbeek, Th. J. A., 81,
92
Salvation Army, the, 249
“Say Not the Struggle Naught
Availeth,” 3 1 1
Schoorel, oil man named, 330, 33 1
Scott, Robert H., 156-158
Sedgeman, Ginger, 144-148, 152
Seki, Captain, 198-202, 254, 255,
258, 262, 264, 265, 268, 270,
277, 289, 293, 309, 310, 317,
318, 3290.
Sesuki, 269
Shanghai, China, 11, 12, 337
“Sheik of Araby, The,” 68, 71
Shell Oil refinery, 330, 334
Shell Oil technicians, no
Singapore, China, 140, 156, 328,
329. 336
Sisters of Charity, the Dutch, 49
Sitanala, Ambonese named, 278-
302 passim
Smallwood, Herbert, 42, 43, 118,
232-234, 297
Smit, 302, 317
Smuggling, 276 ff.
Soengei Gcrong, 50
Soengei Liat, 136
Stammershaus, of Lahat, 137
Standard Oil refinery, 330, 334
Standard Oil technicians, no
Stegeman, 302, 317
Suet, Chinese officer, 321 n.
Sumatra, 13, 21, 39, in, 131, 158,
258, 334
Suribachi, Mount, 341, 342
Tai Hei Yo (O Great Pacific),
68-70
INDEX
Tani, Sergeant, 264-268, 317
Tekelenburg, Surgeon Peter, 54-
57, 135, 136
Tempelers, Indo-European named,
199, 278-302 passim
Terang Boelan, 123
Thomson, Tommy, 21 1, 221, 222,
232, 302
Tojo, 340
Tokyo, II, 154
Tokyo time, 108
Treumiet, Mike, 180, 181, 218
Trouper, the, 237, 238
Twins, the, 76, 79
Ubi raiding, 303-310
Underground, alleged Dutch,
133 ff-
United Press, the, 137, 314 n.
Utah State Prison, 226
van Asbeck, H., 115, 117, 219,
257, 310
van der Bergh, Piet, 256
van der Vliet, Controleur D. J. A.,
85, 86, 99, 100, 1 13, 1 14, 216,
296, 297
van der Vossen, J. A. M., 270
van Gisbergen, Father P. H., 169,
266, 268, 330
van Hasselt, Sergeant, 321 n.
van Hutten, Indo-European oil
worker named, 234, 235
van Thiel, Father, 9, 239
Veer, of Tandjong Karang, 137
von Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald,
34
349
von Gymnich, Beissel, 3, 4, 62, 79,
82, 99, 100, 104, 1 17, 1 18, 195,
196, 216, 296, 297
von Woerkom, William, 171
Votaw, Maurice, 337
Vyner-Brooke, the S.S., 140 ff.,
156
Walter, of Tandjong Enim, 137
Wardle, Rev. A. V., 60, 102, 103,
241
Warmen, Mischa, 143, 146, ,3
Warmen, Mrs., 143, 146, 153
Watson, magistrate from Malaya,
146, 148, 152
Wayman, Dorothy G., 68, 70
Wembley-Smythe, 61-65,
126-130, 195, 196, 241-243
West, G. F. (Paddy), 35, 41, . ,
50-57 poisim, 79, 91, 100, III,
123, 141, 163-165, 169-173.
177-184 passim, 188, 192,
204 fl., 216, 217, 232, 236, 250,
257, 296, 297, 328
Whiteing, Percy, 73
Whitey, 123
Wilhelm, Corps Officer, 321 n.
Wilhelmina, Queen, 312, 313,
314 n., 319; birthday of, 98, 276
Wilkinson, Capt. Tom, 159, ifio
Wilson, New Zealander named,
120, 122
Women’s Camp, 95-98, 106, 202,
253 ff., 280, 281, 323, 324
Ziescl, Dr., 54, 55, 57, 133, 136
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